


The gods are dead

by AuntyAgonee



Series: Olympus Rising [1]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Kane Chronicles - Rick Riordan
Genre: AU, It's rough, Major injuries, Multi, Oppressive regime, Post BoO, Rebellion, The streets are running red, Twisted extremist cult, Usurped gods, Usurping Earth, War, lots of fighting, mentions of and attempted rape, seriously, shit tons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:25:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 26
Words: 74,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2167461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years of peace. After all the bloodshed, the lives lost, the sacrifices made, the hard won peace lasted just under two years. Somehow, impossibly, Gaea woke up again and overwhelmed the entire world inside a single year. In the world’s darkest hour the only heroes who might have had a chance at turning the tides disappeared.<br/>Sixty years pass. A new order is established. The gods are wrenched from the sky and Gaea’s reign is complete.<br/>Then, in the same instant the eight demigods who disappeared sixty years ago awaken. Scattered across a hostile, unfamiliar planet, they must find some way to reunite, using old friends, monsters, gods and even the help of another ancient bloodline, and defeat the earth once more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. at Camp Half-blood

**Author's Note:**

> Hello demigods, magicians and monsters. I have been reading Percy Jackson since I was about 11 and I have been hard-pressed to find a book that I enjoy anywhere near as much as reading the PJO series. Uncle Rick has ruined me. It is only recently that I have started writing fanfictions seriously, if that's possible, so this will be my first contribution the fandom. It's ambitious for a first fic, I know, to write a long winded series, do a cross-over and put in OCs, but I assure you I have been planning this out. So I hope some of you will be here for the long haul and if not, then thanks for reading anyway. Let's stop talking. Let's start the reading.

The disappearance of Leo Valdez is not subtle.  
Even two years after the War on Gaia, as it has come to be called, the older campers who had the unique terrifying privilege of witnessing him in action will turn to stare at him when he passes and so will the younger campers who have heard the stories about him and his fire. Leo isn’t doing anything particularly worthy of note. He’s just walking. There is a satchel slung over his shoulder, full of various machine pieces from a variety of machines, probably a change of clothes too because he has bags under his eyes that suggest he spent another night in the bunker. Leo often does this. His position of the head of the cabin eats up so much of his time it’s a common thing for Leo to pass a whole day without getting any of his own work done, which has forced him to make a twice-a-week habit of all-nighters in the bunker.  
Really Leo is just a piece of the scenery. Clarisse LaRue is focussed on the target at the end of the archery range, her bowstring pulled taught, her breaths measured and a vein gently pulsing in her temple as she tries to ignore the deliberately distracting noises Travis Stoll makes next to her. She waits for the order to fire. And waits.  
And then behind them, on the path a dozen meters away, Leo Valdez says something very quietly, but everyone present catches it all the same “Gods almighty.”  
When Leo curses it’s a good idea to investigate quickly, then hit the dirt if necessary because usually something is about to explode. The handful of archers turn around and are met with a sight they will talk about for the rest of their short lives- for those of them who survive the coming day.  
Underneath Leo’s feet, the ground peels back in layers like a blackened onion. A hand shoots out of the soil, crumbling like ash around it, a hand so white it looks as if it has never seen light before this moment. It grips Leo around the ankle.   
“Leo?” Clarisse says like she’s asking for an explanation.  
His eyes meet hers “I-”  
He’s gone. With a sudden, violent pull the hand drags him into the earth and even as he is being pulled down a perfect circle of soil falls away into empty black space. Then he is gone. No scream, no gasp, no trace. The spell is broken.  
Clarisse and Travis dart forward at the same time and kneel at the edge of the hole.  
“Leo!” calls Travis.  
Travis’s voice is thrown back at him. The hole is a pitch black, a chute right into the earth. It seems to suck away the light, the sound, the air into its vacuum.  
“HEY LEO!!” tries Clarisse, but her words are bounced back at her too like the darkness is a wall. Cold dread tightens her chest. She looks at Travis helplessly.  
“Gaia?” he whispers with a shudder. The name is almost a taboo.  
“I…I don’t fucking know, Stoll. I never saw anything like this.”  
“It has to be Hades.” relief breaks over his face “You saw that hand, right? That has to be Hades.”  
The other archers have dropped their bows and formed a loose, muttering circle around them. At Travis’s earlier suggestion, ‘Gaia’ carries around the circle, each camper shivering as the name is invoked.  
Travis swallows hard “This has to be Hades. He just b-borrowed Leo for a quest. He’ll be back in a few days and tell us all about it.” he glances at Clarisse.  
“Uh, yeah.” she agrees gruffly, not convinced.  
The soil starts to flow. Exposed roots twitch and search, and when the tips of two meet the roots twist around each other and pull patches of the hole together. The hole is stitches itself back together in front of their eyes. Travis reaches forward to catch a patch, but Clarisse grabs his hand.  
“Don’t! You could be pulled down!”  
She calls Leo one more time, angrily, fruitlessly, already at a loss for what she will have to tell his distraught cabin. The last hints of the hole disappear under grey soil. A few stalks of withered grass is the only clue that the spot was ever disturbed.  
“Hades.” repeats Travis “It was Hades, right Clarisse?”  
She barely notices. Instead she stares up at the sky, which is much too dark for a summer afternoon. The clouds are too large and dark and heavy for their consistency and the sky has never been bluer, brighter, or closer. She will be able to touch it if she stands up and reaches as high as she can.  
Clarisse LaRue smacks Travis Stoll on the arm “Oh. Shit. Hey Travis, the sky is falling.”


	2. Sixty years later

It’s the worst fucking thing.  
Out of all the things the kid has to complain about, the posters are the worst thing by far.   
She can tolerate the higher Tiers, her betters, glowering at her as she weaves between their huge forms, dodging protruding appendages lightly for fear of touching one of them and give them a reason to punish her. She can stand the weight of those eyes on her easily enough: a lifetime of disgusted glares has made her mostly immune to them.   
She can deal with the noise. Visitors to the city often wear headphones or earmuff to protect their ear drums from the constant onslaught of noise from the storms of Typhon overhead, the ceaseless thrum of the colonies of dragons and drakon in the ruins of the skyscrapers that border the heart of the city and the regular tattoo of the Great Mother’s heart beat underfoot, as the skin of the earth is quite thin over a vein in this particular area. Being born into the noise is like being born into a refugee camp: you aren’t aware the conditions were awful until an outsider pointed it out to you.  
She can deal with the suffocating layers of clothing. In this city with such a huge concentration of monsters, a word sure to earn her a whipping that would take the skin off her back if she used it out loud, their sulphurous bodily emissions and steaming venom and other things she doesn’t like to think about combine to make a thick multi-coloured smog that churns meters over her head, flowing like a river around the heads of giants whose heads are tall enough to reach so far into the smog cloud they come out the other end.  
It is those fucking posters.  
Each one is roughly twenty feet tall and fifteen feet wide. Up close, the posters are made from a fine organic mesh that can be looked through which makes it suitable for spreading over windows. When she looks up at the posters on the faces of the towers, sometimes another Tier 5 will be peering back at her, although they have no way of acknowledging each other.   
From afar the posters depict the pictures of two Gigantes. Supremely ugly twins, their misshapen features folded and darkened in identically sour glowers, each one holding a club, that at eight feet tall and as thick as the average tree trunk, is almost life-sized. The smog is not so solid that it covers her from the accusing, fish-like eyes of the Twin overlords. Every time she looks up, her eyes are inevitably drawn through the forest of monster torsos and heads to the twins, the smug light in their eyes the artist of the hideous poster captured, possibly unintentionally.  
She simply cannot stand it.  
She cannot stand those eyes bearing down on her, the corners of those rough mouths hitched up just a little in the beginnings of grins. The triumph all the Gigantes, Titans, Gods (yes, she uses that filthy term in her mind too), Giants, Cyclops, demons, monsters, beasts and loyalists she has ever seen glowing with. It brightens every word. It is highlighted in every gesture. It is just as much a part of their heritage as the shame, the simmering hate she inherited as a lowly Tier 5. A mere Fiver.  
If she is feeling especially brave, she will lower her voice, not that the volume of her single voice matters in the cacophony, and whisper among the worst of all curses in her world: “A human.”  
At the times she feels helpless and crushed under the eyes of the posters, lost in the sea of monsters and higher Tiers, branded by the neon 5 on the patch sewn into every item of clothing she owns, her hand will creep up to her neck and her fingers will brush the beads at her throat.  
The beads are easily her most important and damning possession. There are eight of them, counting for two fourths of her life, each marked with symbols she knows by heart. Her parents argued fiercely with her when she explained her intentions on the evening of her eighth birthday, and even Gram, whom she had hoped would be her greatest supporter, had her own doubts to voice.  
Eight was too young for this kind of work, said her parents. She replied that Fivers and Sixes started as young as five. She could die doing this, they said. She retorted that she was going to die sooner or later most likely slowly and cruelly at the hands of a bored Higher Tier, so she might as well get started early so she can make as much of a difference as she can manage before that happens.  
You are sacrificing a lot, said Gram, too much for a kid your age to offer.  
And she had clapped her hand over her heart and reminded her that the golden age of childhood that existed for that select lucky few in her time was no longer an option for anyone, that she was no more a kid than Gram herself and that she had better behave like a mature young woman who knows that.  
Gram had thrown back her head and cackled at her granddaughter’s gall. As she did so the loops of beads around her neck clicked and flashed in the lamplight. A bead for each year. Once, she tried counting Gram’s beads and had lost her place on the second loop of many.  
“Who are we to stop her?” Gram smiled ruefully at her parents “The lady knows what she wants. We’ve done our best, but this is what she will have to face sooner or later. No shame in starting sooner.”  
At the end of that year she had received her first bead. A piece of stone carved with a symbol of her first mission planting a bomb in an alleyway frequented by a gang of vicious Pegasii known to torment the estates on the eastern side of the Fiver districts. The bead was carved with a hoof flanked by symmetrical swirls representing wings, made by Cyrus, a good friend of hers at the headquarters.   
Cyrus.  
She tries not to think about Cyrus. There are a lot of people she tries not to think about these days. Thinking leads to pining. She wishes she could help, but there is nothing to be done. If she pines hard enough she may convince herself that is not the truth of the situation and even set out to do something, which will certainly fulfil her father’s prediction that she would be dead before her eighteenth birthday.   
The headquarters is less than a mile from where she lives. A dangerous location, both for her and for the headquarters, but the downright foolhardy position of the location means the Police are unlikely to go looking for the headquarters here, no matter how much activity there is in the area. It was a smart choice. Gram picked it.   
To get in, she has to break away from the crowds, mercifully, into an alleyway between towers so dingy it looks like part of the ruins of the old world, even though the buildings on either side are modern. The few of the city’s homeless who venture this far into monster territory never go near this place. They might know why they don’t, or they might just avoid the alley because they know there’s something off about it, not the specifics of it.  
She glances over her shoulder then ducks into the alley, breathing the dank air in deep in relief to be free from the crush. The beads click. A hundred feet into the alleyway, she pushes a wooden crate marked ‘blueberries’ and raps twice on the brick closest to the ground. The brick slides back and a pair of grey eyes peer out at her “Password?”  
“O’Leary.” she says.  
The eyes narrow “You’re supposed to say it in a French accent.”  
“For the Seven’s sake, let me in Amin.”  
The brick slides back and with a slight rasp, a shelf slides open in the wall just about big enough for a Cyclops to get into if he crouched, and certainly big enough for her to get through. She slips into the shelf and uses the rungs of a simple ladder. The ladder leads to a platform that will be lowered into the earth by a system of pulleys that Amin mans. On the way down, she passes Amin, sitting in his little guard’s cubicle mounted on the wall.  
“Get it right next time.” he mumbles, already losing interest in her in favour of his book.  
Like every child of Athena she has encountered, Amin’s eyes are intense and grey and he spends most of his time nose-deep in a book. Children of Athena are increasingly rare and easy to identify with their stormy eyes and preference for paper over people. Amin has to wear shaded glasses in public to avoid being picked out as a demigod by the powers that be. So far, he has been able to pass himself off as a dryad, a comfortable Tier 4, but sometimes she is afraid he’ll get careless and give himself away. Only sometimes. She hates it his guts. And he confuses her, being a demi-dryad at the same time as a demigod, which means Athena did the business with a tree and somehow got pregnant by it.   
Thinking about gods and their reproductive methods is like hugging a cactus: you think it’s a good idea until you get close enough, then you can’t stop screaming.  
“I’m on the platform!” she calls.  
“Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicles at all times.” he replies.  
With a rumble, the platform descends into the earth. Some days, she can appreciate the delicious irony of the location of the headquarters. Out of all the places Gaea’s henchmen might be ordered to search, she would never guess the headquarters are buried in the crust of her own skin. Like a tick.  
The closer she gets to the bottom of the passage, the louder the various voices and rumbles of the activists in the headquarters get. This platform was built to withstand the weight of a dozen Cyclops and a few Hellhounds at the same time, and to accommodate the height of a Titan. She is alone on the way down. Normally she rides the platform with a few fellow activists, but somehow, being alone on this platform makes her feel much smaller than sharing it with a Cyclops. Less and less activists have been able to make it into the headquarters when needed since the siege began.  
She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to think about the siege.  
A dragon howls downstairs, making her jump. She is alright with dragons but she hates the hair-raising shriek they use to say ‘good morning’. Light floods the floor, then pours up around her calves and waist and chest and blinds her. Wincing, she shields her face with a hand and stumbles to the edge of the platform, hoping someone will tell her if she’s about to step into the gap between the floor and platform.  
“Hey! Watch it!”   
She stops and waits. A hand seizes her by the arm roughly and pulls her across the gap to solid ground. She blinks.  
“Thanks Octavian.”  
Octavian grimaces “Never thank me.” he plunges his hands back into his apron, producing a ‘squeeeeee’ that must be from one of the numerous plushes stuffed in his clothes, a variety that makes a noise when you squeeze them.   
Octavian has a horrible habit of dropping the squeaky animals in silent, seldom-trod corridors where an unsuspecting activist will step on them and scare the living daylights out of themselves with the resulting noise. It’s common knowledge that Octavian leaves these on purpose as booby-traps. He even enchants the toys to make noises a toy has no business making when squeezed, like the blare of a boat horn, the howl of an air raid siren or the roar of a lion. Hence one of the mottos of the RED headquarters: Watch where you step.  
The crowd is composed of all a manner of people, from the Highest Tier to the second most Lower Tier. The walls are high above her head, the beams crowded with chattering drakons, harpies and other winged creatures. Fly-overs cross the huge hall she has stepped into. Humans, semis and the occasional demi dart across these, their arms full of important business. The hallways leading into other halls and rooms are choked.  
She shakes her head sadly. The kind of day where there is room to swing a cat by the back-legs. What a slow day. She loves the sight of the headquarters, to feel the familiar, comforting hum of her comrades’ voices wash over her, but she loves the place even more when it is jam-packed, when she has to fight through a crowd and shout to make conversation. The siege has changed that. The people who used to stop to talk to her now rush by with barely more than a brief nod on their way to some sort of crisis management. With the main headquarters cut off, little knots and cells of activists are losing resources, support and hope and the task of boosting the morale and supplies of these cells is not easy or short.   
Everyone pulls double-shifts. For the first time in ages, Gram is spending her nights in the headquarters again. Mom and Mama aren’t happy about it, but they let their daughter come in to help her every time Gram requests a change of clothes or some company. She is glad to come, every time.  
When she steps off that platform and into the crowd, she ceases being a lowly Fiver.  
She becomes who she really is: Marley LaRue, semi-god of Ares, long-time RED activist and an eager member of the seething mass in the headquarters who have dedicated their lives to ending the Reign of the green fist of Gaea.


	3. Hades and Persephone

For a moment, Persephone is unsure of what wakes her up. She squints into the darkness of the small room from underneath her arm. Then she becomes aware of the chill creeping under the blankets and turns onto her side to face her husband. He sits upright in bed, his fist tight around the covers.  
“Hades?” she says cautiously “What is it?”  
His eyes are impossibly wide and glow in the gloom of the room. She hasn’t seen his eyes glow in a long time, not since the Underworld fell into the green fist.   
Her heart skips a beat “You don’t mean-”  
“Yes.”  
Persephone gathers him up in her arms, holding him close “You held on for so long. You have long since surpassed your original expectations.”  
Hades lies in her arms like a broken doll, utterly exhausted “It will not be enough. Of all the times for the seals to break, this is almost the worst possible.” he looks up at her, almost pleading. “They haven’t got a hope in hell, Seph.”  
She strokes his hair “You said that when your brother’s lightning bolt was stolen. You said that when Kronos awoke. You said that the first time she awoke too.”  
“I was right that time.” he points out wearily.  
“Please, Hades. Don’t lose heart. You did the best you could and it’s much more than what some of your siblings have done…but are you sure they are all awake?”  
He nods “Every one of the eight I sealed.”  
“All at once?”  
“I felt it…thank the Fates, none of them seem to be in poor health, but Leo is as good as dead in his location.”  
“It’s not your fault, dear. You had no way of knowing how much the city was going to degrade.” She says soothingly.  
Hades shrugs, suddenly apathetic “I did my best. I sheltered them for decades. They’re on their own now.”


	4. Earthworker

Yuri is minding his own business when the pond explodes.  
He has never taken a special note of the pond before. Alright, it is a little strange that this particular pond never sheds its grey shell of ice even during the summer thaw. The surface of the pond was opaque, so the one time Yuri made a point of going off the path to check it out he couldn’t see a thing. The ice reminded him of a piece of quartz, with the frozen surface adrift with chips and cracks. He tested the surface with his boot then did something incredibly stupid, jumping up and down on the ice for no reason other than just that he wondered if he could. Good for him the path he takes into the forest is remote, otherwise he would have been the laughingstock of the town.  
At the moment he is merely one of the orphans in the town, one of those kids too embarrassed or too busy to show up at the school, who crosses to the other sides of the crooked roads to avoid other kids their age, and whose best friend is the bow he uses to defend himself during the frequent days he spends in the woods. Yuri is the kind of kid who spends more time talking his way out of encounters with aggressive bands of Lastrygonians and scaling trees to dodge stray Hellhound puppies and gutting and skinning his kills.  
Despite the amount of time he spends on his own in the woods, or trying to stay on his own by hiding in the snow from monsters, Yuri has a sure grasp of what is normal and what is extraordinary in his society. It is normal to have a little jigsaw-piece of nature misbehaving. Yuri figures the pond is inhabited by a hibernating naiad. He even started saying ‘good morning’ to the pond each time he passed it, just in case he was right. Well it turns out he was right.  
Obviously, the pond doesn’t explode under its own steam, so he must be right. Unless it’s those damned Lastrygonians again. Yuri is about a hundred feet down from the pond. The explosion shatters the quiet air and apparently the ice, because a hail of huge shards starts to rain down. Yuri swears and ducks under a tree, shielding his face with his arms. Giant fragments of ice slam into the snow, shatter on the packed dirt of the path and shake snow from the tops of the trees they crash into on their way to the ground.   
His heart pounding, Yuri forces himself to think rationally about what he should do: this attack is far too random for the systematic snow-ball slaughter methods preferred by the monsters in this area, so odds are this is something entirely different. It only occurs to him he might finally be about to find out what is under the pond when he a shard with grass trapped inside it lands close to his feet. He waits for the last big pieces to hit the ground, than ventures cautiously towards the pond. After a brief struggle he decides to leave his pack under the tree.  
Ordinarily he would never be parted from it for fear of losing it to some mischievous spirit, but if he has to run away, he doesn’t want it to hinder his progress or get taken by whatever it is that just blew up the pond. He can see the pond from here. The whole thing looks like a mouth in the ground, with jagged teeth of ice and churning grey saliva. His breath catches in his throat as he sees a hand the colour of the snow itself, dotted with dark freckles, reach out of the surface of the grey water underneath the grey ice. The fingers grip onto the edge of a piece of ice and is joined by another hand, then a head breaks through the water. It’s a girl.  
She coughs and shivers violently. Her long blonde hair is plastered over her face, so just for a moment Yuri is unsure who the girl is and he goes to her aid quickly. Luckily for her, the pond is not very wide. He can easily reach her arm and drags her to the side, then out of the pond. She falls limply into his arms, too cold to struggle, or speak or cry.  
“Don’t fall asleep.” he says, stripping off his outermost and thickest coat “Your body will fall into shock and you won’t be able to wake up again.”  
He wraps her in the coat. The girl is wearing only a T-shirt and a strange type of trousers that must be jeans, an item of clothing Yuri has never seen before because they are so damned useless against the cold. Her clothes are waterlogged to the point of being transparent. Her teeth chatter so hard she can’t get any words out. She scrapes the hair out of her face and crosses her arms tightly across her chest.  
Then he recognises her. It’s those eyes, the famous grey eyes of Athena. They stare up at him through a wet curtain of blonde hair, suspicious and grateful and afraid. He knows her face. He has seen it a thousand times before and he has even spat at it at the urging of Nastia. Her face is known to every citizen of Gaia’s reign, a mandatory piece of information even for those, like Yuri, who have never been to an official school.  
“Annabeth Chase.” he whispers.  
Her eyes flare “H-h-h-h-ow-w-w-w d-d-do y-yo-ou kn-kn-kn-o-ow m-my-my n-name?” she manages.  
As limited as his education is Yuri understands he is going to have to make a decision that will change his life, right here and right now. He knows the chances of her dying if he walks away are absolutely 100%, because she is wet and the temperature has been hovering around -14 all day. There is a possibility of a roving pack of monsters discovering her if he leaves her and with his footprints in the snow it will be an easy matter of identifying him: he is well known in these parts. To prevent this he could slit her throat and push her back into the pond.  
The last choice is to take her home with him. His father won’t be home for another two days, and the gods only know when his mother will be back.  
“You are going to cause so many problems.” he mutters and helps her to her feet.

An hour later, Annabeth is dressed in Yuri’s own spare clothes. Luckily, they are close enough to the same size for Annabeth to wear his shirt and his trousers without being too swamped to move, although her sleeves are constantly drooping over her hands and she keeps tripping over the hem of her trousers. Getting her into the clothes was a tad embarrassing for them both. Annabeth was shivering so hard she couldn’t work the buttons, the zips or even coordinate her movements enough to pull a shirt over her head. In the end, Yuri averted his eyes and got it done as fast as he could. He was relieved to get the last sweater over her head.  
He put her in front of the hearth, literally, picked her up and put her in front of it. Throughout the process she didn’t utter a word. She trusted her eyes to say everything, and Yuri got the message. If looks could kill she would have reduced him to a puddle long ago.  
Now that they are here, he isn’t sure what to do with her. Getting her into the house was a nerve-racking experience. The house isn’t isolated at all. There are two large houses on either side of Yuri’s house, each one populated with a sizeable family. In fact Yuri’s house is unusual for having less than eight people living in it. Five people were at work in their gardens when he took Annabeth into his house. With Annabeth on his back and his pack on his front, he was so painfully noticeable he didn’t even try to hide. Instead he pulled the hood of her coat over her face and walked fast. Somehow he made it past his neighbours without anyone stopping him, but that is no guarantee they will be left alone. In fact he expects his neighbour to be knocking on the door before sun-down to ask about her.  
For now Annabeth is safe. Yuri watches her from the doorway, already wondering if he made the right call. Right or no it’s what he chose, so whatever consequences that come of it are also his to deal with. On the bright side she finally stopped shivering.  
“Are you hungry?” he asks.  
He doesn’t think she will respond. She surprises him “No.” she looks at him “Where are your parents?”  
Yuri is cut off before he can reply “Don’t think about lying to me. You’re too young to live on your own. How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”  
Insulted and a little harassed, Yuri shakes his head “Seventeen.”  
“Are you a demigod or a monster?”  
He glances over his shoulder and checks the windows are closed “Keep your voice down! Don’t say that!”  
The expression on her face suggests she would like to fling a few more colourful words at him “Why not?”  
“You’ll get into trouble. Those words are forbidden.”  
He watches the confusion and anger chase each other across her face “Where am I? Is this some kind of all-monster island?”  
“Please, please, just calm down and I will tell you everything.”  
She slumps forward, fixing her eyes on the hearth “Just because you saved my life doesn’t mean I’m gonna trust you.”  
“Yeah, well, that’s fine with me for now.” he sits on a chair behind her.  
While he was helping her undress he noticed a large knife strapped to her belt, which could only be made of bronze, and which she was eager to keep her hands on. At some point she stuffed it up one of her overlarge sleeves. He’s careful to pick a spot that’s not within her arm’s reach so if she decides it is necessary to stab him he will have plenty time to dive out of the way.  
“You’re Annabeth Chase.” he starts, but she must think it is a question.  
“Yeah and how do you know me?”  
“Everyone knows you.” He thinks for a moment “Wait here.”   
He dashes up the stairs to his parents’ room. His mother, Nastia, has been a soldier for twenty years, since she turned eighteen and has told him she plans for him to take the same career. When he told Annabeth he was seventeen, he lied. Yuri will turn seventeen in four days, but with her in the house he is starting to wonder if he will make it for the next four days, let alone to the age of eighteen. Fighting for the Cause is certainly out of the question now.  
Nastia always keeps a copy of the Manifesto on her bedside table. He scoops it up and goes back downstairs, handing it to Annabeth.   
“What is this?” she reads the spine “’The Manifesto: a summary of our Mother’s laws of the Reign’…”  
“It’s the rulebook for our society.” he sees no point in sugar-coating the reality. “You’ll find your pictures on the fifth page.”  
She flips through the pages frantically and stops cold when she sees that he is telling the truth. Annabeth stares at the page and Annabeth glares back at her, although it is a disgusting, warped version of her. The Annabeth she stares at has beady eyes and piggish nose, almost no eyebrows and hair knotted like a thorn bush. The real Annabeth’s eyes are wide in shock, her nose is small, her eyebrows are unremarkable and her hair has dried straight.   
The stories paint her as the worst kind of monster, a twisted, warped woman who had no qualms about manipulating and psychologically ruining the people she had a use for, the people she would eventually kill once they were no longer an asset. Her knife was said to have been the end of scores of monsters, almost as many as her consort, whom Yuri is starting to doubt was as evil was the stories say either. Surely if Annabeth is the monster the Reign wishes him to believe she is, she would have leapt on him and eaten his brain already, or whatever it is that they say she does.   
To Yuri, she looks like an average, scared girl in clothes too big for her.  
Annabeth flips the page over and finds another face glaring out at her “Piper?” she whispers.  
Directly after Piper McLean, she finds Frank Zhang. Before her own picture, there is Leo Valdez, then Nico di Angelo, then Hazel Levesque, then Jason Grace and then Perseus Jackson. Upon seeing Jackson, the colour drains out of her face.   
There is a paragraph underneath each picture, describing the documented powers of each demigod, their favoured weapon and a few of the others they have used in significant battles, a few of the weaknesses that have stopped them in the past and a list of the monsters they have killed. Percy’s list is almost the longest, but di Angelo, the one whose picture gave Yuri nightmares when he was younger, he beats him by a few names.  
“This is impossible!” she cries suddenly “They say we’ve been missing for years! Fifty four years…that’s impossible.” Her eyes are pleading “That’s impossible.”  
He shakes his head “That edition of the Manifesto was published six years ago.”  
“Sixty years?” tears course down her cheeks “No. This is fake. This is an illusion. You’re a magician or something.”  
“No I’m not.” he shrugs helplessly “I was just there when you came out of the pond.”  
Annabeth parts her lips and cries silently. She makes a low keening noise and rocks back and forth over the picture of Perseus, clutching it to her chest. She reminds Yuri of the soldiers’ spouses when they are told their husbands and wives will not be coming back home.  
“This isn’t true.” she repeats it like a mantra. “It can’t be real.”  
Yuri waits awkwardly for her to calm down. Eventually, she sucks in a deep breath and pulls herself together. Her voice is still thick when she speaks.  
“Who are you?”  
“Yuri.”  
“Are you a mortal?”  
“You should call humans…” he feels a brief thrill of fear, having never uttered the word aloud before “Tier Fives from now on. Fivers if you want.”  
“Tiers?” she asks.  
“The people of Mother’s Reign are arranged in Tiers.” He points to the book “You will find it all in there.”  
“When you say ‘Mother’, do you mean-”  
He shakes his head frantically “Don’t say her name.”  
“Why not?” she straightens up “I beat her once before. I’m not afraid of her.”  
“Beat her?” Yuri raises an eyebrow “She controls the entire world. Her Reign stretches across every square inch of soil on the globe, and the oceans are practically hers too. I would not call that a victory.”  
Annabeth narrows her eyes, but a flicker of a smile plays across her lips “I think I’d like to be alone now. You know, to digest. This is all kinda disorientating.”  
He stands up. Honestly, he is glad to be out of this girl’s way. She makes him uncomfortable, the way he feels in the forest when he knows there is a monster on the roam and he is waiting to see how it will attack him.   
Yuri leaves her reading the book in front of the hearth. There is a strange light on her face, and he doesn’t think it is being cast by the fire.


	5. Tombstone City

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I'd like to apologise for the near month of inactivity. I have just moved to Australia and we didn't have any wi-fi for about a week. It was hell, I was lonely and isolated and depressed and ate an unhealthy amount of green apples, so I didn't get all that much writing done, but I'm here now. So, yeah.  
> Hi and stuff.

The afternoon is as slow as things get in the Ruins.  
In the distance the city shimmers sullenly, a mess of wood and concrete slapped together at the last moment over forty years ago to shelter what remained of the human population of this part of Africa (wherever this part may be). It is clearly visible from the watch-tower. The guards who occupy this tower, only one of the twenty that are interspersed around the city’s limits to warn the citizens of attacks, have grown up and lived their entire lives in the city. Long ago, the city had a name but those who remember it are forbidden from uttering it, so by and large it has been forgotten. There are a few semi-affectionate nicknames given to the rare foreigners who ask where the hell they are when they arrive, such as The Vault or The Tombstones. As a result of the last name, people born in the city like the two guards call themselves Stoners.  
This always gets a giggle from the foreigners for some reason.  
These two Stoners have been passing a relatively pleasant afternoon playing Snap with a deck of cards bearing the likeness of the Titans (each one has been defaced with moustaches or dribbling noses). They are relaxed. So far, there has been nothing alarming enough to merit a report back to the city, just the usual herds of distant dinosaurs plodding across the horizon and the packs of zombies that trail behind them, in hopes that one of the older ones will drop dead and provide a meal. There are a couple of raptor clans around, but apart from that? Nothing; just a slow afternoon.  
One of the guards glances up, searching for his water bottle. He squints over his partner’s head in confusion.  
“Kambili…am I losing my mind or is that an ostrich trying to outsmart a raptor clan?”  
His partner follows his eyes. She doesn’t see anything at first “Are you feeling ok? Is it too hot?” she is concerned her partner might be about to experience what Stoners call ‘brain-melt’, a phenomena that affects people who have been working too hard for too long in the unforgiving summer sun.  
Then she sees the ostrich.  
“Holy shit!” she grabs her binoculars for a better view “Look at that fucker go! I’ve never seen an ostrich before!”  
They have both seen pictures of the scores of animals that have gone absent in the surrounding areas, fleeing the influx of dinosaurs in favour of lands where they don’t have to worry as much about being made a meal of.  
Her partner grabs her arm in excitement “Do you think they’re going to catch it?”  
“Of course they are! Raptors never let their prey get away!”  
Raptors are as common as pigeons in these parts. Great, ugly, vicious things with the brains of tacticians, always trying to wriggle through the weak spots in the city’s defences and terrorising the wildlife. Forget the zombies! They are the biggest danger out here, in the wilds in which the city is situated. The guards in the watch-towers have to use zip-wires to travel about because of the raptors, and even then those things will try to jump for the guards as they zoom overhead.  
“Thabo, have you ever seen an ostrich?” asks Kambili “Do you know how fast they can run?”  
“Hell no! He’s booking it though, that’s for sure.”  
The ostrich has managed to out-streak the two raptors flanking it by a couple hundred feet, which is far better than any other type of prey can hope for. The rest of the pack is probably waiting under rocks in the path the ostrich has been steered into. Ambushes are another thing raptors are capable of, one of the techniques that has made them the most feared predator in the Ruined Savanah.  
“Hope he makes it.” says Kambili.  
“He won’t,” says Thabo flatly “Look at those ridiculous legs! It’s built of sticks and straw and those raptors are steel and stone. Easy meal.”  
“Do you think it tastes good?”  
“We’ll never know, will we?”  
A raptor springs out from underneath a rock 10 feet in front of the ostrich, baring its teeth to attack. Both guards draw a sharp breath, knowing the spectacle is about to come to an end. Suddenly, abruptly and altogether quite rudely, the ostrich inflates and swells to the size of a small wagon, then wrinkles so quickly it seems to be melting. The stunned hunters stop in their tracks. If dinosaurs can look completely bamboozled, then these dinosaurs do. Their quarry, the ostrich, has inexplicably become an elephant.  
“What the hell?!” shouts Thabo.  
“Great gods of the Mountain! It’s a miracle!” shouts Kambili.  
“FUCK OFF!!” bellows the elephant through its trunk.  
Thabo leans so far forward he almost falls over the side of the railings. “That HAS to be a Shaman! We should help him!”  
Kambili grabs her rifle, but by the time she looks back she can see the elephant has the situation under control. It rears back on its fat hind legs and crushes a raptor under its front. She can hear the sickly snap from a quarter of a mile away. Another raptor springs at it, but the talking elephant swats it away with its thick trunk. Chaos ensues and all the while the guards hear the elephant trumpeting curses in a strange language. Eventually the elephant stands in a circle of squished dinosaurs. Its sides are scored with a few red scrapes, but the raptors claws seemed to have a tough time doing any damage to its leathery hide.  
Thabo snatches his rifle up, but Kambili smacks him “Don’t shoot it!”  
“I wasn’t gonna! I was gonna get his attention!”  
She hands him an ancient megaphone.  
“Won’t this attract zombies from miles around?”  
She points to the base of the walls, where a couple hundred corpses are pounding and gnashing at the high walls. “What’s a few more? The wall can handle it.”  
“HEY! YOU THERE! ELEPHANT!”  
The elephant’s giant head turns in a confused circle, searching for the source of the noise.  
“Its eyes must be bad.” Kambili guesses. She has never seen a real elephant before either, but she doubts that’s what it is after watching the transformation. There are rumours of Fivers and Sixers with great powers, and among them is the ability to change into the skins of animals. She used to pray to the gods of the Mountain when she was a little girl to be granted such mighty powers. Obviously it never happened.  
Cautiously, the elephant sheds its form and shrinks into a large and lithe black cat. A panther? Again, the guards only know it by the pictures they were shown in school.  
The whatever-it-is doesn’t seem to have trouble seeing the tower, because it begins to run towards it.  
Glancing anxiously around, Thabo sees the zombies are already being drawn out by the sound of the megaphone. The land is treeless and flat for miles around, so he easily sees the ragged corpses staggering in their direction. Luckily, the terrain is treacherous and rocky. Zombies have a difficult time negotiating their way across anything but even ground. The cat is making good time anyway: it has already halved the distance to the watchtower.  
“What should we do?” he asks, a little scared at the prospect of bringing a possible Shaman back to the city.  
“Why are you asking me? Like I know what the ostrich-elephant-cat thing wants! If it looks bad, then we’ll put an arrow in his head and leave him out for the zombies.” She hefts her bow over her shoulder.  
The rifles are only for show: each one is loaded with two bullets. They make too much noise when fired and are only used in emergencies, when there’s something very scary comes towards the watchtower and is out of the range of a bowshot.  
The cat screeches to a clumsy stop at the bottom of the watch-tower. Kambili is about to suggest lowering the ladder for the cat, but the cat shrinks into a beautifully coloured parrot and flies to land on the railings no problem. What happens next is surprising, even after what just happened.  
The bird lets out a very human sigh and falls to the floor of the watch-tower. By the time it hits the ground it has turned into a large, stocky young man. He reminds Thabo of the wrestlers who make their livings in the underground rings; powerfully built and intimidating to the point that people will gladly cross the street to avoid getting in his way.  
Somehow, a pack has appeared slung over one shoulder, and there is a variety of classical-looking weapons strapped to various limbs. He looks like a walking armoury.  
“Where am I?” the man rasps. His accent is American.  
“We call it the Tombstones.” Kambili offers him her water-bottle carefully.  
He drinks gratefully “Uh, this may sound weird, but what year is it?”  
“The sixtieth year of our Mother.” says Thabo.  
His insides grow cold. He glances at Kambili and sees from her face that she has just realised the same thing as him, exactly who this strange man they have just taken into the guard tower is.  
“Frank Zhang?” the guards say in unison.  
His eyes widen “How do you know me?”  
Kambili nocks an arrow in her bow.

(Approximately two hours earlier)  
Frank is confused.  
Even more confused than he was after he watched Inception and the Matrix trilogy in the same weekend. Even more confused than the time he accidentally kissed Dakota and spent the rest of the week wondering if that qualified him as not only a filthy cheater, but bisexual because he had kinda liked it? Even more confused than- well, any time he has ever been bewildered about anything, the confusion he felt at waking up in the thin air and the snow-covered slopes of the peak of Mt Kilimanjaro has trumped it.  
Trying to orient himself, he stood up and immediately fell on his butt again. His legs shook, as if they had not been used in a long time. He remembers feeling this way on his first day out of the wheelchair the final fight of the Gaian war had put him in, which he spent grabbing onto things and people, fighting to stay on his feet.  
His first thought is that he has been summoned by a god. He waits patiently on his back in the snow for a god to jump out from behind a rock and shout “SURPRISE MORTAL!” or something. Dressed in a thick and several thermal layers, he is well-protected against the cold.  
He notes with growing uncertainty there is a back-pack beside him. Searching it, he finds it to be stuffed with spare clothes, rations, water, a few of his personal effects, toiletries and almost every weapon he owns and a couple he doesn’t. Back in Camp Jupiter, he had this closet stuffed full of various dangerous and contraband items he had confiscated from other campers. They called it the ‘Dragon’s Den’, referring to a form he used frequently to persuade fellow campers to hand over their illegal stuff. The most choice items have been tucked into his pack, including a little tool-belt of grenades he caught a seven-year-old half-brother of Reyna’s using as paper weights.  
“Father?” he calls, because it seems a very Mars thing to do to transport his favourite (most useful) son to the middle of snowy-nowhere with a bag of heavy arms.  
Secondly, he wonders if this might be Hazel’s doing. Sometimes, when she practices her shadow-travelling, she’ll accidentally snag a couple of other people in the portal. One time she managed to bring the entirety of the Hermes cabin to a remote spot to the Amazon rainforest. She was too weak to take them back after that unexpected strain, so Leo and Nico ended up hopping down to the rainforest in the Argo II to air-lift the campers out.  
Hazel may be hiking down the mountain for help. Or she may not be.  
“Hazel?” this time he finds the strength to stand.  
He slings the pack on his back and cups his hands to his mouth “Nico? Percy?”  
He decides to try the names of every person that might be responsible until somebody replies with a ‘sorry Frank, I screwed up’.  
Leo doesn’t answer. Neither does Jason, Piper, Annabeth, Reyna, Grover, Juniper, Chiron, either of the Stoll twins, Octavian, or anybody. He tries the names of many gods from both mythologies. Finally, timidly, he tries “Grandma?”  
Deep down, he knows their encounter at his house during his first quest was their last, but sometimes he can’t help but feel a ray of hope that he might meet his grouchy grandmother again. If she was here, she would have nailed him in the back of the head with a snowball for addressing her in English.  
Frank is alone.  
But at the same time he is not. He feels it in the earth, in a way he hasn’t since the war. It’s not true of course. No way can it be true. Gaia will sleep for millennia before she even becomes aware that she is asleep. Frank sacrificed more than he knew he had to give to ensure that.  
So he ignores the feeling of breathing soil under his feet and instead focuses on the snow. He scoops up a handful and takes a bite, his teeth stinging. The snow tastes pure and fresh, almost glacial.  
Frank decides he should walk a while on foot before he changes into a bird, in case he misses whoever brought him here by flying. By the thin air and the blanket of deep snow, he guesses he is up a mountain. The natural thing to do at the peak of a mountain seems to be to go down. Frank carefully walks a couple feet down the slope.  
He hopes he doesn’t trip up here. It feels remote and unmarked by the hand of man, with just hundreds of feet of barren snow in every direction. If he falls and breaks something here, he’ll lie injured for hours. Maybe until he dies from exposure.  
Positive thoughts, Frank, positive thoughts, he tells himself.  
After ten steps he falls straight down a hole. On the bright side, the hole is not very deep. He falls up to his waist. His legs buckle, but he grabs onto the edge of the hole and manages to stay upright.  
“So graceful,” he mutters.  
Removing the pack, he wriggles out of the hole with some difficulty. His foot scrapes something hard on the way out. He turns around and lies on his stomach, staring into the hole.  
“Please don’t be poisonous.” he begs the mystery object and reaches in.  
His fingers close around something cold and smooth. A piece of …bone?  
Not just bone. A piece of time. He must have a fragment of one of those skeleton warriors his father grows in his garden like others would grow flowers. It feels like Grey, a warrior Mars gave to him on the same quest he said goodbye to his grandmother: old beyond years and malicious beyond words.  
Frank stares up at the clouds. He expects Mars’ blood red chariot to come bursting through the snow at any second, but nothing happens.  
“Uh, thanks I guess, Dad.” he stows the bone in his pocket and continues down the mountain.  
His first clue that the earth is a little older than the last time he saw it is the pterodactyl that glides overhead about fifteen minutes after he sets off. It glides out of the clouds casual as you like and disappears into them after a few seconds.  
Frank stands in the same spot he first sees it for a long time, his mouth hanging open. Then he walks on. He racks his brains for what it might be. Of course, he already knows why there are apparently dinosaurs going around like they own the place. When Annabeth talks about the war, she likes to speculate about how much worse it all could have been. She loves to describe how Gaia could have moved not only the earth, but what lay in it to make life hell for the Argo II. She speaks of beasts that went extinct in the centuries before the first Titan was born, and Nico sometimes chips in with a remark about zombies.  
Zombies. Oh gods. Frank prays, literally prays to his dad that there will be no zombies.  
A flock of smaller, scaly pre-historic things zip overhead. Frank’s knowledge of dinosaurs is limited to what the Jurassic Park movies taught him. He doesn’t know if normal dinosaurs could tolerate cold temperatures –hell, it’s amazing that he needs to know about ‘normal dinosaurs’ at all! If one of them looks like it’s gonna try to take a bite out of him, Frank will dissuade it with the bow stuffed in the ski-bag, or maybe one of the half-dozen spears in there too.  
After an hour of walking Frank’s feet are starting to get numb, despite the four pairs of socks he wears. He gives in and sprouts a pair of wings. As usual, everything he carries and wears is sucked off and away into the nameless black space where they will stay until he becomes human again. He has been meaning to ask Nico or Hazel if they ever see his stuff hanging around in the shadows they use to travel.  
Frank flies down the mountain, over the snowline, over the rocky terrain underneath it, over scraggly trees and past one nymph. He considers stopping to see if she knows anything, but she scrambles into her home tree the moment she sees the shadow he casts. Jittery nymph. Every now and then he spies a shape in the clouds like the first pterodactyl and those little lizard-sparrow things that followed. He is careful to avoid these.  
Strangely, there are no birds like him in the sky. Unsure of where he is, Frank picked an inconspicuous hawk to blend in with the surroundings. One of those average brown and grey birds he sees all over the place. It rarely steers him wrong, except on the unfortunate occasion he wears a hawk into magpie territory.  
No birds at all. The sky is as empty as the mountain underneath him. Except the mountain seems to be full of dinosaurs stripping the leaves off the trees.  
Frank reaches the bottom of the mountain after a short flight. When he lands, he makes sure to land in a tree that doesn’t have any of the long-necked dinosaurs Frank keeps seeing chowing down on it. Panic is setting in gradually. He finds his phone in side pocket inside the pack and calls Hazel. Or tries to. It rings no less than eighteen times. She doesn’t answer.  
A few months after the Gaian war, Leo announced it was time somebody did something about the constant problem of cell phones. The Hephaestus cabin set about perfecting a mobile phone network that demigods could use without alerting the monsters. Somehow, they succeeded.  
The phone Frank uses is a common-or-garden Apple model. The only difference between it and one belonging to a mortal is the network, which sneaks under the average monster radar and allows demigods to use it without essentially sending up a flare, a signal demanding that every monster within ten miles should come and bite their head off, please. Frank’s not sure how they did it and he’s not about to question it.  
The phone makes it much easier to scream for help when he’s besieged by monsters.  
He tries Hazel twice more. He tries Percy next, although Percy forgets he has a phone, leaves it on all day until it runs out of juice and then wonders why it won’t turn on. Then he tries Nico, who is always reliable about picking up his phone, even though he treats it like an alien organism that might eat his hand if he gets too close. If Nico isn’t picking up his phone, then there are problems.  
He tries every number, even Octavian. The coverage of the network is global, without any exceptions due to some blessing from Hephaestus or something. Some phones ring. Other phones are silent, dead ends.  
Frank starts to cry without knowing why. The tears start going and he doesn’t try to stop them. He feels like he has just walked through a graveyard populated solely by the corpses of his friends, his family. The earth, alive and immobile. The long-necked dinosaurs hiking laboriously up the slope of the mountain, which he now recognises as Kilimanjaro from pictures he has seen, and the darting things in the sky. The silence at the other end of every call he makes. His sudden appearance at the top of the mountain, the supplies, the bone, the way his body aches and groans as if his muscles are just remembering their duties.  
Frank has been gone for a long time. Lots of other people are gone too. His girlfriend and the rest of his friends may be dead. He can’t remember anything that seems important from yesterday. It was a normal day. He sparred and talked and ate and slept and now there are dinosaurs.  
Frank stared at the useless phone for a long time before he puts it back in his bag and slides down the trees.  
He’ll find the nearest city. He’ll walk through the night if he has to.


	6. Stonehenge

If Stonehenge were still a tourist attraction, the crowds the stones once drew would have been treated to a very unusual and quite disturbing site if they had cared to look to the fields and farm-lands to the left of the site. The closest field is littered with mounds of earth, meters tall, the resting places of people believed to be the great heroes and chiefs of the past. They are called Barrows.  
One of the great heroes of the past seems to be trying to get out of his Barrow.  
At first, there is a gentle rumbling, no stronger than the smallest earthquake. The rumbling becomes a sort of growl thrumming through the floor, then all at once the side of the Barrow explodes in a spout of soil and grass and a small figure rolls out, cursing. The figure hops up and immediately falls over. He stands again, carefully, leaning on the ruined tomb for support.   
“What the fuck, Dad?!” he calls into the surroundings “What the hell did I do?”  
Certainly, if Stonehenge was still a tourist site security would be rushing to dogpile on him, and tour groups would run screaming in droves from this apparent zombie.  
But he is alone. For the moment.  
The boy shakes a long yellow slab of bone out of his shirt sleeve. He shivers. Rain falls thick and heavy from a steel-grey sky, which looks more like the belly of a great grey beast than a blanket of clouds. He is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, unprepared for the chill. Already his shirt is plastered to his chest and his hair drips.   
“Dad?” he tries again, then “Persephone? Uh…Hazel?”  
When no one answers, he checks inside the Barrow and finds the backpack he uses when he goes on the road, with a bedroll strapped to it and an interesting collection of weapons he remembers seeing in Frank’s treasure trove of contraband. It looks like whoever packed him has packed him for a war. And there’s a note attached to the bag.  
He crawls inside the shaft to get out of the rain, moving a couple of disintegrating pieces of tin armour out of his way, and plucks the note off the bedroll.  
He reads it aloud “’Find the seven. Find the resistance. Don’t look for me. I will find you. Good luck. I love you. Sleep well.’”  
A heavy feeling settles on his shoulders. Hades’ writing style is easily recognisable; he never writes more than he has to or uses any flowery words, making his notes seem more like orders. He gets the feeling this is exactly what he is reading. Orders. Suddenly, sheltering inside the Barrow, the earth, doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Folding his father’s note, Nico di Angelo slings the pack over his shoulder and slides out of the tomb. He is about to start digging through the bag for a rain coat when he notices Stonehenge.  
“Stonehenge.” he muses “Huh. That’s weird.”   
He notices with relief that the large stone that was knocked over the last time he was here, with Frank and Reyna who were responsible for the accident, shows no signs of the damage the Romans caused and that it hasn’t fallen over again, even though it was he who raised it hastily, using the skeletons on the site while he berated the other two for their clumsiness.  
Nico wants to have the luxury of wondering why his father, Lord Hades of the Darkness he who eats his emotions and souls for breakfast, would leave him such a tender note –well, tender by Hades’ standards. But he knows why. He can feel it in the earth. If the sky is the belly of the beast, then the earth is the skin, alive with movement he can feel under his feet the sluggish pulse of Gaia’s muddy blood. There is no doubt that she is awake, even though it’s impossible.  
Nico doesn’t even want to think about what the camps went through to bury the DB (Dirty Bitch, Leo’s affectionate nickname for her which somehow became the common term across Olympus). To even consider that effort, the sacrifice and the blood that went into saving the world is wasted, made worthless after only two and a half years. He swallows hard, the cold forgotten.  
Fortunately, he can still feel his friends. A couple years back, Nico discovered a strange ability, a sort of psychic attachment to his nearest and dearest that allows him to sense the energy emitted by their continued existence. He forgets about their negligible warmth when he doesn’t focus on it, but he is always at least faintly aware of the tiny fires of their auras inside his chest, like a cluster of tea candles. Sometimes he gets little flashes from them, for example if someone is badly injured, the candle will flare as if saying ‘guess who’s about to cark it!’. Last year when Piper started developing the symptoms of the tuberculosis that floored her for two weeks, only two thanks to the healing skills of the Apollo Cabin, his insides would go cold as if he had drunk a bucket of ice water at random moments.  
With relief, he notes each of the auras burns as brightly as they ever have. His friends are alive, wherever they are and that’s good enough for him. He has his sword and he knows his people are alive somewhere. That was all he needed before. Hey, maybe burying Gaia will be just like riding a bike? You fall off a couple of times and maybe get some scrapes, but you never really forget how to do it.  
Then the universe decides to remind Nico that he is a demigod and things never go well for demigods, who are basically target practice for the Fates. A zombie stumbles around the Barrow.  
Like, an actual fucking zombie. A genuine, honest-to-Olympus zombie with milky eyes and ragged clothes and rotting, stinking flesh limping towards him, its stringy arms outstretched.  
Nico is so surprised and disgusted by the zombie’s sloppy workmanship, he has to stare at it for about ten seconds with his mouth open, making a quiet gurgle of horror at the back of his throat. Then it clicks. He draws his sword, lunges forward and lops off its head. Black blood oozes like lava out of the wound. He makes a noise on par with the sort of noise Annabeth makes when she sees a tarantula.  
What could have created this? Gods, out of all the undead specimens he has ever seen this has to be the most poorly put together, rotting and falling apart at the hinges due to a careless resurrection and still smelling of the grave it crawled out of. Gross. How could anyone use this thing?! Although he will never admit it even under interrogation, bodily fluids and the cloying odour of rot make him queasy, which is why he always takes care to bring up his undead minions in one piece. He would give up on necromancy entirely if he had to walk around smelling like a zombie after every battle.  
“Blech.” he resists the urge to kick the head a mile and instead focusses on the fact that the zombie went down with a strike to the head.  
Classic zombie. Classic undead minion of any sort, actually. Always aim for the head. Even the most far-fetched of stories have taken their ideas from an old legend, with roots in the truth. Except for that thing about werewolves and silver. Never ever works.  
A shiver runs up Nico’s spine. The kind of shiver he gets when someone else is messing around on his turf, which is to say with all things under the earth. He can smell raspberries.  
That’s another weird thing: a little over a year ago, he noticed every time someone got scared he would be over-powered by the scent of raspberries. When was around mortals it was blueberries. Eventually, Hazel explained she had been experiencing a similar thing and they figured out they were smelling fear. They laughed about that for half a day. Since then, Nico has developed a sort of monster-ish sense of smell that also picks up on demigods, monsters themselves and even gods, who smell like furniture polish (the stronger the demigod, the stronger the scent, so it just about murdered Nico to go near Jason or Percy until he found a way to block it out), sulphur and, weirdly, lemons, in that order.  
His range only extends about a mile. The rain is affecting his senses, but he can tell he’s about to cut up a hell of a lot more gross things than he wants to. The view from the top of the Barrow is good, despite the rain, or maybe his eyes are sharpening the way his sense of smell has.   
Yeah. He’s right about the gross things. The horizon is dark with the press of zombie bodies, all stumbling in his direction.

 

(Approximately 3 miles away)

The bird is freaking out.  
After trying every technique she has in her inventory, Hope Victor has no choice but to shut it inside a closet and hope that the dark, confined space puts her in a sleepy mood. She nudges a bloody piece of rodent under the door with her foot and whispers “I’m sorry.”  
She doubts the bird can hear her. Sometimes, it seems the bird can understand her words when she speaks in English which is why she named the bird, creatively, English. But English is beyond all sense today. Hope has no idea what happened. She woke up in the middle of the night at English’s insistence, who nearly pecked her in the eye in her haste to get Hope out of bed, to make her comprehend whatever animal emergency she is having. Hope thinks it’s the middle of the night. The sun is still up, but it has stayed up constantly for the last two weeks due to a dispute between Helios, the sun god, and some old god who’s squatting in the sun, trying to get better rights for Tier 2s and 1s of his bloodline, which is to say the rare Egyptian minority. As a result the sun remained stuck in the sky in its noon position, but for some reason over Europe exclusively. Gods. Always fucking around with nature, no matter which earth they sprung from, Gaia or Geb.  
Just as she is beginning to think the day might return to peace, Hope hears a swell of familiar, grating voices. She goes to the window and watches the backs and heads of the undead crowd pass underneath. There are about twenty of them in a herd and a couple of stragglers on the horizon. Hope isn’t worried. From her tower, she can watch the zombies go about their zombie business in safety and relative comfort, even though their moaning drives her up the wall sometimes. Lately with the sun refusing to leave the sky, she has been more susceptible to trivial irritations such as them. Hope opens the window and wishes she hadn’t when the smell hits her, and looks in the direction that the zombies are headed.  
Grey rain obscures her vision. On a clear day she can see all the way to Stonehenge, since the land is all fields and monuments around here. She wonders if another convoy is about to get caught in a zombie attack. Being the only surviving Lookout tower in these parts makes her a popular destination for desperates fleeing from the zombies. Just last week she hosted half a dozen Fivers and three Fours from the mainland, all of them younger than ten. She’s not sure her provisions can take another hit like them before the next supply drop.  
“Funny, English,” she glances at the closet “Shit like this doesn’t bother you normally. I mean, you have fucking wings, darling, not much of a problem, those grounded rotting fuckers, are they?”  
English’s reply is piercing.  
“Gods above and below! Keep it down!” she shuts the window “You’ll have them all on our doorstep, you know!”  
Hope grabs one of the books in the pile on the table. English loves this series. “Want me to read some Percy?” she asks.  
Hope is holding a book entitled ‘The son of Neptune’, possibly hers and English’s favourite out of the entire series, except they both agree (well, Hope is sure that English agrees) that Nico needs more page-time. English repeats her screech. Apparently she isn’t in the mood for Percy.  
The books were written by the same woman who has inspired generations of people to go on to be heroes that deserve their own books, the Director of the organisation Hope has been working for since she was old enough to walk. RED.  
Written by RED. For RED. These books tend to be handwritten, passed from person to person in manuscript form. The first series chronicles the exploits of the Round-One veteran Percy Jackson, also involving Annabeth Chase and Nico di Angelo, although the latter doesn’t really start to shine until the second instalment of the series, the ‘Heroes of Olympus’. The Director knew each and every one of the Argo II personally and made it her mission to commit their bravery to paper during the first years of Round-Two, as the second war on Gaia has been dubbed. The first copies of her first book, ‘the Lightning Thief’ started to circulate when Hope’s mother was young.  
By the time Hope’s mother had grown, she was a soldier and every book RED was ever going to write had been written, all the way up to ‘House of Hades’. Much to the disappointment of the readership the Director never published the final volume in which Gaia is defeated. Rumour is she doesn’t really know how it ended because they never explained it to her, but the more popular rumour says she will finish it when Round-Two has been won.  
As a Lookout tower, Hope has managed to collect a copy of every book. She reads extracts to some of the groups passing through, if they stay the night, picking the passages that inspired her the most when she was little and continue to do so even now. Her favourite has to be the battles in Rome at the end of ‘The Mark of Athena’, because even if everyone screws up and almost dies (a reoccurring pattern actually) it’s the only time the dream-team are assembled, including Nico.  
She and English have read through the two series together at least three times. Well, she reads to English, but she gets the feeling English reads some parts for herself over her shoulder sometimes.  
“Suit yourself, feather-ball.”  
Hope sits down and starts to clean her knife. A bronze knife, just like Annabeth’s, she thinks privately with glee every time she uses it. Hope is something of a closet fangirl.  
English attacks the closet door with renewed ferocity. Afraid she will crack her beak or claws, Hope sighs and lets her out. The bird shoots around the room, her wing-beats sending papers flying all over the room and blowing Hope’s hair back. Settling on the top of the bookshelf, English preens a wing frantically and chirps loudly.  
“Psycho,” mutters Hope.  
Then the radio explodes.   
Crying out, Hope grabs her rifle and climbs a ladder, through the sunroof and onto the crow’s nest. It is guarded with a reinforced, transparent material she can’t name, but it can stop a bullet and has plenty of times. Also the crow’s nest provides her with a 360 degree view of her surroundings. Down below, she can hear the panel of instruments she uses for communication crackling with static, and through the static the rasp of indistinct, tired voices.  
“Somebody’s working some major-ass magic around here!” she calls to the bird.  
English croons, probably asking for more dead possum.  
Visibility is bad. Whoever is doing this could be standing only 20 or 30 feet away from the Lookout and Hope wouldn’t know it. The zombies have already gone…maybe to the source of this static wave.  
Sliding down the ladder, Hope grabs her rain slicker and sword and lifts her arm, the sign for English to land. Surprisingly, she does.  
“We’re gonna go check that out.”  
English cries enthusiastically, as if that is what she was trying to say all this time.


	7. Lieutenant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was just handed Blood of Olympus. I may have peed a little bit in excitement.

“Lieutenant? They’re about to open fire.”  
Throwing down her hairbrush, Reyna swiftly wraps her jacket about her torso and swears “They couldn’t even wait for me to get a damned bra on! These bastards! Orion, hand me my armour.”  
The man comes up behind her and clips on the Kevlar vest, then straps her breastplate over it. While he works Reyna rehearses her excuses in her head. Yesterday, she told the army outside she would have their sacrifice ready by this morning, today, right now, shit shit shit because she didn’t even bother to consider which of her hunters she could spare towards the Giants’ feast outside. The thought of one of her kids roasted on a silver plate with an apple stuck in their mouse like a fucking goose actually made her vomit. She couldn’t face it. She’s desperate. The whole situation has been nothing but desperate, a landslide of crisis after crisis for the last five years, but every time she has managed to pull through by the skin of her teeth and to drag most of her people with her.  
“What are you going to tell them?” asks Orion.   
His hands, the size of Reyna’s face, fumble with a clasp on her belt. She helps him buckle it.  
“I’m going to laugh in their faces.”  
“Oh really?” Orion chuckles “It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. Well, not ‘see’, but you know what I mean.”  
“I look forward to the day when you run out of blind puns.” grumbles Reyna “You must write them out when you have free time.”  
“I never have free time.”  
“I know. That was a joke.”  
The last strap is pulled into place. Reyna is now decked out in complete armour, an embarrassing mishmash of Roman and Greek pieces that doesn’t fit together correctly, but gets the job done. She looks at herself in the cracked mirror one last time, wondering how many new scars she will have the next time she sees her face again, if she gets the chance at all.  
“Will you teach me how to get around if they get the other eye?” she traces the scar over her left eye, a souvenir from her dealings with a certain goddess a few decades ago.  
“We have this discussion every time the shit hits the fan.”  
“Why break tradition?” she takes Orion’s hand and looks up and up and up a little further “Will you?”  
Orion nods, smiling down at her from his lofty height “Sure. But I don’t think you’ll be able to lead the hunters anymore.”  
Reyna sighs “Yes that would be a fucking tragedy wouldn’t it.”  
Grabbing her sword and bow, Reyna heads into the halls. A few heads pop around doors on her way, pleading for an explanation or reassurance. Reyna ignores them.   
Instead, Orion issues the orders “Stay inside. Don’t come out for anything. You know which passages to use if worst comes to worst.”   
“Will they get in?” asks an old woman with a puppy stuffed down her shirt.  
“Eventually.” says Reyna, although she isn’t really addressing the woman “But not today.”  
The clamour of the ragged army outside reaches her even this deep into the camp. She can just barely make out the chant, a faint, badly rhyming demand for sustenance in the form of something tender and juicy. Reyna has seen what they do to the sacrifice before the poor child is eaten, when she was still just a common hunter. She starts shaking with anger to think about it. When she took up the diadem and all it meant, she swore the sacrifices that were a monthly ritual with her predecessors were a thing of the past. So far she has managed to keep that promise.  
“Are you ok?” asks Orion, the way he always does.  
“Fantastic.” every nerve is charged with energy and tension “And you?”  
“I’m about to piss myself.”   
Orion has only done this once and Reyna has forgiven him for it, considering the two of them were nearly crushed by the head of a giant which was catapulted over the walls of the camp.  
They burst into the light, blinded for a moment, Reyna shields her eyes and shoulders her way through the hunters in her way. She has made this trip so many times she knows the steps by heart. The roar is overwhelming.  
“Oh thank the gods you’re here!” says a nymph inexplicably wearing a net over her head like a shroud “The defences are failing!”  
“When are they not failing, Nettie?” grumbles a nine-year old girl next to her who has looked like a nine-year old for the past fifty years.  
“Britomartis, Asal, please. Let’s not advertise how scared we are any more than we already have. And get that net off your head.” orders Reyna.  
She looks to the army outside the walls. Monsters. Not all of them, but enough to stop Reyna from feeling much guilt about the slaughter she plans. They’re a rag-tag bunch. In the old days, they would have been no more than a fifteen minute diversion for Artemis and her hunters. The old days were a long time ago and Artemis has been imprisoned for most of the time since.  
Someone must have spotted her, because a fresh chant starts up. Her name. Hearing it bellowed, hissed and growled at the top of a hundred monster voices makes her want to scrub herself raw, but she swallows her anxiety.  
She clears her throat “What business have you here today?” as usual the strength and projection of her voice surprises her, so much so she almost can’t believe it is really her talking.  
One of the larger Cyclops, a brute going by the name George Clooney for some weird reason, steps forward and yells over the monsters. She has acted as a leader many times in the past, so Reyna can only assume George is the commander of the army.  
“You know what business! Give us a child!”  
“A tasty one!” adds a harpy to her right.  
“With good skin!” agrees an empousai to her left.  
“And extra pepperoni!” calls out one of those weird walking-knife demons the Egyptian bloodline is responsible for.  
Britomarits chokes back a sob. Asal shakes her head, knocking an arrow in her bow. All along the ramparts other hunters are preparing in similar ways, or crying.  
“We’re going to die.” says Orion grimly.  
Again, a tradition for him and Reyna.  
“Why should I?” Reyna pretends to inspect her nails.  
“You promised you would last weekend! Or have you forgotten?” George pulls out the telephone mast spiked with nails she uses as a weapon and thumps it on the ground.  
“You promised you would gather up this…rabble, and leave us in peace many months ago.” returns Reyna.  
Her stomach churns. She may throw up. “And yet you are still here, blocking my view of the mountain.”  
In the distance, the mountain shimmers. Most of its surface has been covered in the tempered steel they used to build Artemis’s enclosure almost sixty years ago. If she squints, Reyna can see the thick, greasy coils of the dragon Ladon wrapped around the cage on the peak, dozing as if there wasn’t a vicious group of loyal hunters plotting his demise less than five miles away from his napping spot.  
“Give us a child. I may then consider it.”   
“What child would you have me give?” Reyna spreads her arms “The ‘children’ you see here are well into their forties and fifties! And I doubt you want Orion, who is as old as the hills although he has only just recently returned to the living.”   
“We know you’re hiding an entire refugee camp just beyond those doors!” George spits “I can smell their piss and shit and fear, their lovely, raspberry fear.”  
Reyna’s chest twinges painfully as she remembers words like those coming out of someone else’s mouth decades ago. ‘Raspberry fear’…  
Almost laughing in spite of herself, Reyna bites her lip and looks to the slate-grey sky to regain her control “I don’t know what this silly business about refugees is. Everyone knows San Francisco has been a ghost town since the start of Round Two. Literally. You take ten steps into the city limits and you’re up to your elbows in eidolon.”  
“We know!” George barks impatiently “We live there! Quit stalling! We will open fire on you if you don’t relinquish one refugee child immediately! No, in fact now I want ten! Fifteen! The price will get higher and higher for every minute you make me wait!”  
Reyna shoots a significant look at Britomartis. The nymph nods wordlessly.  
“Fire away!” Reyna spreads her arms.   
They do. An onslaught of boulders fly through the air and crash into empty space about 30 feet overhead. A wave of cusses goes up from the army, which is nearly drowned out by a cry of triumph from the hunters.  
“The Lady of the Nets!” cries someone.  
The cheer goes around the ramparts.  
Where the boulders hit the space, the mesh of a golden net traces itself in mid-air with a noise like wind-chimes. It shivers out of existence only to reappear again, holding stubbornly as the barrage continues. One of the drakon hovering over the army shoots forward, intending to burn a path through the nets. The moment it touches the invisible dome of mesh it explodes, quite literally, into a hundred smoking fragments of flesh and scales. You’d think the army would have learned that particular attack doesn’t work, but no. They try it every time they show up.  
The weight lifts from Reyna’s shoulders. Sucking in a breath, she leans onto the railing of the ramparts and knocks her head on it.  
“Lt.” whimpers Britomartis.  
“What is it?” she groans.  
“When I said the defences were failing, I wasn’t talking about our wall.”  
Reyna’s insides freeze. “No? You wouldn’t happen to have been referring to the nets?”  
The nymph nods mutely.  
“Fuck.” mutters Reyna.  
“I’m sure I can hold them together until-”  
“No, I mean go and fuck someone. This is likely your last day alive. Go find a cute boy or girl from the refugees and show them how a nymph does it.”  
The nymph flushes and fans her red face “I don’t know how a nymph does it! I’ve been celibate for millennia!”  
“Well you guys must be doing something right. There is a reason the gods were always after the green skirts…”  
A muffled explosion in the far distance interrupts Reyna. She jumps violently. Looking to the east, towards the ruined city, she sees a giant bloom of flame shooting up through the crumbling sky-scape. The monster army stops in mid-jeer to gape at the fire.  
“What the Mother is going on over there?” demands George “Which one of you lazy Egyptian bastards took a day off, hmm? Who was it? If that’s Blood-stained -fucking-Blade again I’ll make him wish he was never summoned from the Underworld!”  
A mutter passes through a crowd then one of the few humans offers “Not one of ours ma’am.”  
A broad smile spreads across Reyna’s face “Orion.”  
“Yes?”   
“Remember this morning I was telling you about my nightmare?”  
“The one about Leo?”  
She nods “I don’t think it was a nightmare. I think it was Leo asking for directions.”  
Reyna puts her first two fingers in her mouth and does her best taxicab whistle, the way Percy taught her. A whinny of reply sounds a short distance away and Scipio flies into view. He lands on the ramparts and knocks over a few of the smaller hunters with the torrent from his wings.  
Reyna hops onto the ledge and shouts over the chaos to her hunters “Hold on! I’m going into the city to retrieve a very valuable ally! If all goes well, we should be able to wipe out this army by nightfall.”  
“This army?” Asal points to the monsters “The one that’s been plaguing us for half a year?”  
“Yes, Asal, that army.”  
Reyna mounts Scipio “I’m coming right back.”  
And then she urges Scipio forward, exiting via a small hole in the nets Britomartis opens for her briefly. The Pegasus and the Lieutenant have sped into the distance before the army can react.


	8. Three weeks before the end of the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well I just finished 'Blood of Olympus'. I didn't go anywhere without the book so it only took me a day to finish it.  
> Wow.  
> Just wow  
> Good one Uncle Rick. I applaud you. What keeps me from crying at the thought that it is the last proper Percy Jackson book is the idea that we'll be getting an Egyptian crossover soon.

Jason crouches low to the ground. The dragon eyes him warily, licking her cracked beak with a forked tongue, trying to figure out what he plans to do. Taking a deep breath, Jason uncoils and tosses a tennis ball with all his might. The dragon goes absolutely crazy going after it. She digs titanium claws into the grass and springs after it, but it is too late. Another demigod has caught it before the dragon makes it halfway. Nico pitches the ball back to Jason, who takes a deeper breath and braces for impact. He catches the low-flying ball which hits his hand with approximately the same force as a missile. It almost knocks him over, but he rallies in time to throw the ball back as the dragon bears down on him.  
The dragon is faster this time. She charges like a locomotive and steams from her nostrils. Nico balks. He zooms up a nearby tree at the speed of sound and lets the dragon catch the ball.  
“Couldn’t get a dog, could he?” grumbles Nico, hanging upside-down from a branch like a bat “Not Leo Fucking Valdez. He has to adopt a dragon.”  
“I still say we should have called her Toothless.” Jason jogs across the training pitch to pet the dragon.  
She chews her tennis ball happily with teeth the size of Jason’s arm, at least half of them are made of bronze. The ball deflates with a slight hiss.  
“She has teeth.” points out Nico. “Hence the reason I decided to climb a tree rather than fight her for the ball.”  
Sitting down beside the dragon, Jason watches her roll the ball between her giant claws “Toothless or Puff or Saphira or Smaug. Or Festus Jr, you know? The potential was wasted.”  
“Your fandoms are showing, O Golden One.” The other demigod slides out of the tree easily and scratches the dragon between her horns. She purrs and the ground vibrates.  
“No they are not, O Dark One, I’m just saying there was a lot of potential gone to waste. How awesome would it be to yell ‘TOOTHLESS!’ and have an actual dragon come swooping out of the sky to save your ass? It would go great with the soundtrack on the Argo II.”  
“Leo hates the soundtrack. The Stolls instolled- I mean installed, they installed it as an April Fool’s prank. If anything having the score to ‘How to train your dragon’ blast out every time Leo makes a left turn would make him avoid that series at all costs.” the dragon pounds her foreleg, the prosthetic one, on the ground to show she enjoys her massage.  
“Still… what the hell kind of name is Imagine?”  
“As in the band. Imagine Dragons.”  
Groaning, Jason falls on his back “But it’s so obvious. No subtlety. She’s not even radioactive.”  
“But she is a warrior. She has a battle cry too.”  
Jason raises his head to glare at him.  
Nico smirks “She spends a lot of her time on top of the world when she flies, right? We found her in Amsterdam too.”  
“Ok I’m gonna stop you there while I still like you.”  
Imagine is not really Leo’s pet, considering the effort that went into saving her extended across both of the camps she’s more of a community pet. Leo and Annabeth found her on a mission to Amsterdam’s red-light district (empousai were posing as prostitutes and were eating their way through most of Amsterdam’s middle-aged workforce). She was a crumpled pile of scales and blood languishing in an alleyway, waiting for death. From the state of the dumpsters she lay on, the two guessed she had lost an aerial dog fight and had been thrown to the floor to await her death. Of course Leo fell in love immediately.  
When Annabeth and Leo came back, they not only brought with them an adult shop’s worth of skimpy lingerie (for some reason), but a crippled dragon.   
The Vulcans and Hephaestus’s kids pulled together and created some amazing prosthetics to replace over half of her teeth, her right back-leg and both of the claws on her front-legs and a to patch up a lot of the holes in her scally armour. She was named Imagine by Percy, after his all-time favourite band, and she became something of a mascot shared between the camps –after the Argo II. (Well, the Argo III but after Leo had finished it he down-right refused to add yet another one of those ‘I’ things to the title, so they ended up calling it the Argo II: the sequel)  
Imagine had a sort of pathetically hopeful charm that drew a lot of people to her, and when she was well enough to walk around it became apparent she was a people-dragon. Some weeks of training went into getting her to take her dumps in the right place, but on the bright side she and Peleus got along famously. Now Imagine is a common sight on the grounds. She spends most of her day rough-housing with Mrs O’Leary, Percy’s gigantic hellhound, or following Leo around and giving him loving, sticky licks with a tongue the size of a toddler.  
Jason loves the dragon too. Then again, he tends to have a bit of a complex when it comes to adopting bruised, beaten loners with a tragic past.  
“You’re looking at me funny.” says Nico  
Jason scrambles for a lie. Generally Nico doesn’t recoil in horror and rage at the thought of discussing his past now, but Jason likes to tread carefully around the subject just in case “I was just thinking…it’s almost three years since the war.”  
Shrugging, Nico scratches Imagine at the base of her horns “Hard to believe it.”  
“I still can’t believe how old we are. You’re almost a college kid.” he grins widely “It’s about fucking time as well.”  
Nico shrugs again. During the first year after the war he and Hazel enrolled in a local high-school. Turns out, Nico is really smart when he applies himself, like 4.0 average smart. Somehow it seemed to Jason that it was the right thing to happen, that Nico deserved to have a few more nice surprises in him. Next fall he will be moving onto the college in New Rome at the tender age of seventeen. Jason would be lying if he said he wasn’t buzzing with excitement. The thought of having Nico on campus with the rest of the team, except for Hazel, is Christmas and Halloween at the same time for Jason. He’s dangerously attached to this kid, to the point where people have started to refer to them as ‘platonic life partners’.  
“You’re making that face again.”  
“There is no face.” says Jason “It’s all in your mind.”  
Imagine rumbles in what might be agreement. She then ducks her head under her arm and starts to bathe herself.  
“Nice Immi.” Nico scoots away from the dragon “What are you going to do?”  
“Probably the same thing as last year.”  
“What, you mean pile into the Sequel with the rest of the team and say we’re going for gelato then getting stranded in the middle of a Peruvian desert for two days?”  
“That was awesome.”  
“Yes it was. Up until the Nazca Lines came to life and tried to eat Reyna’s face.”  
The team is composed of the original seven plus Reyna and Nico. Every year on the anniversary of the day the war was won, the Romans and Greeks get together and throw a huge party, a sort of ‘NYAH NYAH WE’RE STILL ALIVE’ to Gaia and her various minions, some of whom still roam. When the first anniversary loomed on the calendar, a heavy sense of dread settled over most of the team at the thought of having to celebrate a day that was the culmination of the most harrowing experience of their short lives.   
So Leo suggested they take the Argo II somewhere quiet until the party was over. They spent the first anniversary of the war on a beach on a remote stretch of African coast splashing in the water then later feeding popcorn to passing sharks while the sun set. Thanks to some sort of teleportation device Hephaestus gave to Leo when the new ship was finished, they were able to make it back before night fell on Long Island. It’s been a tradition ever since then and the time of the year Jason looks forward to the most.  
“I’m serious Jason, you’re making a face.”  
“And I’m serious… there is no face.” he drops his voice to a husky whisper, his best approximation of Rachel’s old prophecy voice “All in your head.”  
“Can I tell you something weird?”  
Uh-oh. A lot of Nico’s confessions start this way. Last week, he told Jason an absolutely horrifying story about his first night on the streets when he narrowly missed being raped. Nico actually had to tackle Jason to the ground to stop him from flying to New York in search of the almost-culprit. If it’s another one of these stories, Jason intends to get away this time so he can play the drums on the guy’s head with a crowbar.  
However, Nico’s expression is more thoughtful than guilty this time “You have to swear not to tell anyone.”  
“On the Styx?”  
“Shit no!” he glances around to make sure no one else is within ear shot, then he starts to explain a very strange thing that happened to him! Just don’t tell anyone or freak out, ok?”  
“Ok.”  
“In February when I found Julia,” he pauses, his eyes grim and distant “I had some help.”  
Jason shudders. In the fiasco following the end of the war, so many people were displaced, disorientated and dead in extreme cases that it was a week before anyone realised the little girl who guarded the border with the god Terminus was missing. There were search parties of course, but her name was only one among a multitude. There was only an aunt and a few cousins in the city to miss her. With so many dead and gone, the families with missing members had to move on. Sometimes a new corpse turns up.   
February was an example of one of those times. As far as Jason knows, Nico was answering the call of a child’s ghost that lead her to a corpse frozen in a Lastrygonian’s cooking pot that turned out to be Julia. Her body was thawed and given back to her family for a burial and that was that, apparently.  
“Hey…I thought it was the rule now that you weren’t gonna nest on anymore bad stuff.” says Jason slowly “I mean, it starts by swallowing one thing and then another and then before you know it you have a nest big enough to sleep in and you spend all your time up the angst tree.”  
“Angst tree? Uh, this isn’t bad Jace this is just weird. The kind of weird I can’t really spread around, and besides I’m not nesting I’m telling you now.”  
Relieved, Jason gestures for him to continue.  
“I didn’t hear a ghost calling out to me at all. I was just taking a walk around the borders of the camp. I was alone, since there was a heavy snow on the ground and I’m the only person crazy enough to take a long walk through a remote area in a heavy snow. But as I got further and further from the camp I felt less…less like I was alone. There was a presence. Not a threatening presence.”  
“You mean like when you know a friend is sneaking up on you?” suggests Jason.  
“Yes. Finally I looked up and I saw a man dressed all in black standing on the slope of a hill above me. They’re always in black. The guy I saw was about your age. I didn’t really look close at him. His appearance just didn’t seem important at the time. He made this gesture like he wanted me to follow him, so I did.”  
Jason clucks his tongue.  
Nico holds his hands up “Hey, I had my sword. I was smart. People knew I was out. I’m a grown man for the gods’ sake, I can follow the creepy man in black into a snowy forest if I feel like it. He took me about half a mile in. The entire time we walked he was about ten feet in front of me, no matter if I tried to catch up to him by running or if I slowed down. Never said a word either. Eventually he lead me to a ravine that was almost buried in the snow, but he pointed at it and the snow melted around it. Julia was there.”  
“Why did he do it?”  
“That’s where it goes from marginally weird to immensely weird. He spoke to me as soon as I had seen who was in the pot. I asked him who the hell he was, and he said ‘Just helping a brother out’, then he walked away into the woods.”  
Jason sits up properly “Do you think he was your brother?”  
Nico snorts “Gods no! After all the trouble Hazie and I have caused Hades probably carries spermicide and condoms everywhere he goes. I would have known if he were a sibling. He did carry that kind of aura with him. The smell of the Underworld, except it wasn’t really our Underworld.”  
“I’m confused.”  
“So am I. Jace, I think I saw a foreign god.”  
Jason’s jaw drops “How do you know?”  
“I could tell he was a god, but he felt different. The way the first Roman god that I saw felt.” the demigod shrugs uncomfortably “If Olympus is still hanging around then why not Asgard too? Or the Persians, or Dreamtime or maybe Egyptians or something. Most modern societies have a foundation in the ancient civilizations. The belief that sustains the Greek and Roman gods could be doing the same for other mythologies.”  
“But…the Romans and the Greeks shared gods. The Romans stole away the Greeks’. I get how those two mythologies can coexist, but…but the world was created the way the old myths say, right? How can one creation myth be true if there are a bunch of other gods and their creation myths hanging around?”  
“I don’t know.” Nico looks troubled “I’m just telling you what I saw. I know a god when I see a god.”  
“I believe you.” sighing, Jason throws himself on the grass face-first “Life never gets easier does it? The big screaming emergencies are still coming in droves.”  
Nico pats him on the shoulder “We don’t know if we’re in trouble yet. Calm down, all I saw was one teenager in a trenchcoat. It’s not the end of the world.”  
The older demigod hisses “Touch wood.” he slaps the tree trunk “Don’t tempt the Fates!”  
Nico stands up “Get up Jason. There’s no use in wasting a nice day prostrate on the ground just because life is threatening to get difficult again. Let’s find the others.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jasico: the bromance to end all bromances. In my eyes anyway, haven't got a thing against the guys who ship it romantically.


	9. Scavenger

The rational part of her mind decides she is either dreaming or tangled up hopelessly in her bedclothes again, that any minute she will fall from her mattress with a jarring thump that will knock her back to her senses. All the other parts of her mind are screaming, panicked and suffocated from the lack of fresh air and from the solid darkness on all sides which refuse to give way underneath her blows no matter how hard they are. She knows automatically that she is underground. There is six feet of earth over her head, and she shares this ground with scores of other corpses, although most of them seem to be trying to creep back to the surface and are spilling out of the ground. The ground is breathing. Beating. Veins of oil web the surface of the earth, capillaries like grass roots. Beyond this, she can’t think.  
She can’t scream. All she knows is she’s buried and dying of slow oxygen starvation. If she were in her right mind, Hazel would reach out into the ground around her and summon lumps of minerals to her to drill the wood open, precisely and gently ensuring she has the space to wriggle out of her space, which has to be a coffin, and then push her way to the surface steadily so that her air lasts her to the surface. Hazel is about as far from her right mind as she has ever been.  
Scrambling for a weapon, she stumbles over a large lump of sharp rock about 10 ft away. She summons it at such an incredible speed it blasts through one side of the coffin like a cannon ball and would have continued straight through her side if Hazel hadn’t stopped it in the last microsecond of its journey. Dirt pours in. Her mouth is filled with it. Now of all times, she finds the strength to scream and ends up swallowing a lot of foul-tasting earth in her efforts. Hazel drags herself out of the coffin and mashes the dirt away. It’s like swimming through oil. She claws forward. Hazel whips her hands to the side as if fending off a swarm of bugs and the soil parts before her like curtains. There is no air underground. The sides of her little tunnel threaten to give way at any moment and choke her sinuses even more. Just when it seems like she is going to black out, her hand bursts through the surface.  
It clenches around something smooth. Distantly, she hears a cry of fear. Using her grip to pull herself forward Hazel manages to break through into the open air. She spits soil and gasps desperately, then laboriously extricates her torso and legs from the dirt.  
Wiping the dirt from her eyes with her free hand, Hazel sees she’s holding onto ankle which is attached to a man who, judging from the smell of ammonia, may have literally wet himself.   
“Wh-wh-who…who…” he’s too terrified to get the words out.  
Hazel spits a piece of rock. She considers her options and decides she should continue scaring the living shit out of this man in case he has some answers “Who are you?”  
“No. I was gonna ask…” he whines “But…aren’t you Hazel…Hazel Grace? No, no that’s not right.”  
A siren blares inside her head. She’s let him go and on her feet before she knows she has moved, and running faster than she knew she could. Her legs howl in protest. They are so sore if it weren’t for the adrenalin flooding her blood she would fall over. Her demigod senses demand she moves at the speed of sound. She barely registers that she is weaving through graves an jumping over skeletons that look like they were killed a second time in the act of escaping their graves, that her feet are sink into sand and that a hot, dry sun beats down mercilessly on her back.  
However she does notice the other people in the graveyard. They shout in surprise. She knocks a woman in her path flat on her back without breaking stride. A man steps into her path. Lowering her shoulder, she rams into him with a good portion of her considerable strength and sends him sprawling too.  
“STOP!” someone cries.   
Why does anyone ever think that will work?  
Hazel may have kept going straight into the desert if she didn’t see her brother.  
It isn’t her brother, that dark figure lurking between two tall crosses. For one thing he’s much too tall to be him because he hasn’t grown past 5ft 6in despite the advent of puberty. But she stops anyway.   
“Nico?” she rasps.  
“Run.” he urges.  
Too late. Someone tackles her and crushes her into the sand, planting a hand on the back of her neck so she can’t struggle. Strong hands catch her wrists and pin them to her back. Letting out a muffled cry of protest, Hazel strains to see the figure once more. It can’t be, but at the same time it has to be. The presence of death hangs in the air like a heavy fog. Almost exactly what she feels when Nico is around. It’s comforting.   
Her big brother is here. It’s all going to be alright.  
“Captain! It’s the ghost!” a shout.  
“Well, shoot it then! Just drive him off! We don’t have time for his nonsense!”  
“That’s the Ghost King you moron.” she mumbles “I think. Sure as hell looks like him.”  
“What did you say?” the tackler addresses her.  
She lashes out violently, suddenly and drives her foot into something very soft. It produces a satisfying grunt of pain from her captor. It doesn’t get the person off her. She only gets her face pushed further into the sand.  
“What the hell is a Ghost King?” mutters another person off to the right.  
“My ovaries.” groans the woman on top of her “Get those fucking ropes already…”  
Gunfire cracks off to the left.  
“He’s gone!” calls a man.   
“Bring me those ropes!” shouts the person on her right “She’s still got some fight in her.”  
Wanting to prove the point, Hazel finds a chunk of quartz a couple of feet down and clocks the woman hard in the chin with it. The woman refuses to fall off of her. She grunts in pain and then presses Hazel’s face so deep into the sand with her knee she can’t breathe. Sand fills her nose and mouth.   
“She can’t breathe, Raph.” mutters a voice to her left.  
“Serves the little bitch right,” says the woman “Striking one of the Faithful. How dare she?”  
Stars dance in front of her eyes. Her body has become inert under the woman’s, too tired to move from the burst of speed after an untold amount of time in the coffin. She forces herself to think, despite the lack of oxygen. Pluto. Pluto came to the camp yesterday while she was teaching a class on the minority gods and literally pulled her out of the place. He just stormed in and grabbed her by the wrist in front of an entire class of younger campers and pushed her through a shadow. Her memories of what he told her once they were in the Underworld are spotty, but she’s sure he said something so horrible her heart actually stopped beating for a moment from the sheer shock of it.  
The oil underground, flowing like blood.  
Gaia is awake.  
But for some reason, Hazel is still alive. She is planted face-first in the ground, Gaia’s very skin, and she has yet to be killed. Although with the crowd around her she doubts she will be able to appreciate this stroke of luck for very long.  
Finally, somebody yanks her head out of the sand by the hair. She coughs and spits sand.  
“Hazel Levesque.” says the man.  
She blinks and wonders if her eyes are playing tricks on her, or if the man really doesn’t have a nose. His face seems strangely flat and alien without it. A strip of cloth has been tied over where his nose should be and across his cheeks, so only his eyes and his mouth are visible. If he’s trying to direct attention away from his lack of schnoz, he has done the exact opposite. Hazel is so busy marvelling over it she forgets to answer and is rewarded with a hard slap across the face.  
The man rubs his hand, swearing “Shit…little piss.”  
“Eloquent.” Hazel finds the creepiest, most lethal Pluto-smile she has in her armoury and plasters it on.  
The effect is instantaneous. The man dives backwards in horror and hits a tombstone which collapses under the weight. He falls over backwards and slides down the slope they are at the top of like he’s surfing the sand on his back. Hazel and the woman track his rapid, screaming process down the slope and both flinch as it ends abruptly, ramming head-first into a wooden cross that then proceeds fall on top of the man and strikes his crotch so hard Hazel winces in sympathy.  
The woman rolls off her and hauls her to her feet “Any more of that nonsense and I’ll flay that pretty face of yours off with this.” she produces a large knife from her pocket and lets the blade catch the sunlight “Understand?”  
“One more scary trick and my face is forfeit. Got it.” she’s too confused to be afraid right now.  
“Excellent.” The woman smiles icily.  
Another woman offers her a piece of rope, which she uses to bind Hazel’s wrists behind her roughly. Honestly Hazel is glad of the support. Without the woman man-handling her she would probably fall over and end up stomach-surfing down the slope. The man has curled around the crotch-cross like a dead insect and makes a faint, high-pitched noise like a distressed bat.  
“Who are you?”  
“You don’t ask any more questions, understand? Not after this.” the woman turns her roughly by the shoulders and sneers “We are the Faithful and you are a blasphemer, Hazel Levesque. You are our prisoner now.”  
Hazel shrugs “Whatever. Take me away then.”  
She is still struggling to remember what the hell it was Pluto told her as the strangers lead her away into the depths of the desert.


	10. A knowing follower

Ever since Juno wiped his mind like a blackboard and dumped him miles from his home with a false identity, Jason has had some small problems with his short-term memory. He frequently forgets where he has put his glasses, which are usually perched on top of his head the entire time he searches. Sometimes he asks the same question two or three times in the same conversation. Once he poured himself a cup of water then put the full glass back inside the cupboard. Names are a definite problem, even with his closest friends. He forgets surnames and merges names into Frankenstein approximations, like ‘Pleo’ and ‘Nanabeth’, until he’s reduced to gesticulating in a silent rage at the person he meant.  
But this is ridiculous.  
Jason glances around the campfire and the unfamiliar faces, the strange dark setting and is painfully reminded of that first moment on the school-bus when he became aware he had no idea who he was or who the people around him were. He’s even holding a girl’s hand again.  
Granted, this girl can’t be more than ten and he seriously doubts she is going to claim to be his girlfriend. Her hair is as short as Thalia’s (thank the gods he hung onto the fact that he has a sister) and her eyes are a bright green, her skin as dark as Hazel’s. She is cleaning a large cut on the palm of his hand with a cloth and reprimanding him for getting injured with language a girl her age shouldn’t know.  
“I cannot fucking believe you. I swear to the Mountain, you are the dumbest fuck I have ever had the misfortune of stumbling across. You’d better thank me for watching your sorry ass. Shit! Look at this mother, I’ll bet you’re gonna get an infection. Let’s hope it’s not like the one old man Marvin got last week, huh? Don’t want your dinga-ling dropping off.”  
Jason’s mouth drops open. He has rarely heard such foul language coming out of even a teenager’s mouth with the same amount of gusto that this little girl is using it with, except maybe when Leo shouts at a busted machine. She wipes the cloth over the red, raw flesh several times, then glances around them furtively and reaches into her bag. Pulling out a small phial full of a familiar gold liquid, she uncorks it and splashes a few drops onto the cut before Jason can protest.  
“There. Ichor will keep it from festering.” she flashes him a grin that suggests she is sharing a delicious secret and stows the phial again.   
“I don’t know where I am.” blurts Jason.  
The little girl furrows her brow “The land of the living, I hope. Are you even fucking awake?”  
“Stop saying that word, gods, you’re way too young.”  
“Fuck off you bastard!” she sticks out her tongue “I’ll employ whatever language I see fit, thank you very pissing much. What’s wrong with you?”  
Binding the cut with a bandage, the girl claps him on the arm and stands up, brushing dirt from the seat of her pants. She takes a sip from a metal canteen and offers him a sip. Realising his throat is parched, Jason takes a drink as civilly as he can. When the little girl looks away, he checks his wrist. Over the last month the gaps in his memory have gotten almost comically bad; Jason was starting to forget where he put important things, like the number of his cabin and which classes he took at the University of Rome. Piper solved the problems by having him write a message on his wrist every day: in case of memory loss, call someone.  
It’s still there. Therefore, he must still be Jason in some way.  
Lucky for him his friends are all pretty cool about him calling them in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes the night, to ask if anyone knows where he left his allergy pills or if he has a middle name. Well. They almost don’t mind. Nico did have to tell him in no uncertain terms if Jason called him at 3 a.m. to ask how ‘Jason’ was spelled again, Nico would have to kill him sadistically with a fork. Jason glances uncertainly at the night sky. That was last week, so maybe Nico has forgotten his vow by now? Probably not. He has a tendency to remember threats he has made, even if he doesn’t act on them often.  
Jason looks around him and sees his bag is propped up at the base of the rock he is sitting on. Not the bag he was expecting, the satchel he keeps his important stuff in –spare glasses, Benadryl for his allergies, his phone most importantly- but the giant backpack he carries his homework from the University in. It’s strained at the seams, absolutely stuffed. Jason pulls it into his lap and unzips the front pocket.  
Inside, most of the clothes he owns have been folded and crammed into the space.   
“Nice face.”   
He jumps. He had forgotten about the little girl in his confusion.  
She leans over his shoulder and peers into the bag “What’s wrong?”  
“What’s your name?”  
The girl’s face clouds. She looks upset “You know my name.”  
“No I don’t.”  
“Do you know your own name?”  
“uh…Jason?” he tries hopefully.  
She shakes her head “It’s Poppy.”  
“Poppy?” he repeats incredulously “That’s a girl’s name!”  
“The fuck does that mean?” she is genuinely unsure of what he’s saying “’Girl’s name’?”  
He flounders “You know! Boys have names like Edward and Bob and girls have names like Zoe and Anna!”  
“I know of, like, five fucking guys named Anna. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The girl puts the back of her hand to his forehead “Maybe you do have a gods-damned fever after all. Shit, this isn’t good.”   
He bats her hands away “My name isn’t Poppy. That’s just stupid. I’m dreaming or something.”  
“Are you sure you don’t know my name?”  
“Yes!”  
“It’s Akuna.” She leans in as if she expects the name to trigger a wave of memory for Jason, but is disappointed “You don’t know who I am?”  
“No. Why do you have ichor anyway?”  
“Poppy, do you remember anything?”  
She gestures to the other people at the campfire, thirty or so in number. Most of them are wizened with age or disfigured by scars. They are crowded around the campfire, talking in hushed voices and squinting over their shoulders at the dark on all sides. Jason notices he and the kid, Akuna, are sat a fair distance from the others. They even have their own fire in front of them. He can’t make out any other fires in the dark and he realises the people at the main one are doing their best not to look at the two of them.  
“Are we outcasts?” he shivers, suddenly cold despite the warm night.  
“Well duh. They hate us. They’re afraid of us. How can they not be?”  
Jason nods “Well I can be pretty freaky. But I don’t see anything wrong with you.”  
Akuna gapes at him “Pops, I am a fucking freak of almighty proportions! Tell me you remember the fucking freakiness!”  
He shrugs helplessly.  
The little girl stoops and mutters “Just this one time.” she rolls up the leg of her pants and strikes a dramatic pose to display the freakiness on show.  
Jason squints “You have a tree leg. With roots.”  
Akuna covers up her leg again quickly. What Jason saw was a small, slightly stunted limb that must create a limp when she walks, beaded with knots like the texture of real growing wood, and webbed with greenish veins. It’s kind of like what Jason has seen in the camps when a dryad’s skirts are caught up in a breeze. The rest of her is plain old flesh.  
“Uh…” he points to the other campfire “Are those guys like you?”  
Akuna gives him a look “No. That’s my problem. They’ve never seen a bastard like me so thusly I am totally terrifying and must be kept away from normal society at all costs.”  
Something doesn’t seem right to Jason. There is no way that he knows of that mortals could see through the Mist that surely shrouds this girl’s leg. But they’re sure unnerved by something. Jason glances down at himself and checks all of his limbs are still flesh, which they are. Akuna watches bewildered as he tugs the hand-mirror he uses as a wallet out of his bag and looks at his reflection.   
After a moment of careful consideration, Jason announces “I’m Korean.”  
“Yeah.” says Akuna “And I’m Aboriginal. Are we re-doing our introductions now?”  
“I’m Korean.” Jason repeats, touching his face.  
The boy staring out of the mirror at him is Korean, with short black hair and a spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose. He gapes at Jason in shock. When Jason reaches up the scratch his nose, so does the boy. Then it dawns on him.  
“Hazel.” he whispers.  
“No. You Poppy, me Akuna.”  
“No. My friend, Hazel. She did this. She can transform people with her illusions.”  
Akuna’s face grows dark, and she motions towards the campfire “Hey buddy, how about we keep our voices down when we’re slinging around the names of the Eight? Never know who’s listening out there in the bush at night.”  
Jason shakes his head. So does the boy in the mirror. Disturbed, Jason closes up his wallet/hand-mirror and stuffs it deep into his bag. He turns to Akuna, who seems to be looking at him differently now.  
“What do you know about Hazel Levesque?” she asks so quietly he can barely hear her.  
“I know plenty about her. We’re good friends.”  
Akuna bites her lip “Well I guess that answers my question.”  
“Which question?”  
“The first time we met I could tell you were lying to me.” she thumps her wooden leg “Felt it in my leg. I asked you who you really were. And I guess I know now, Jason Grace. You murderer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm aware that the chapter title may seem a little cryptic, but when I was picking out Akuna's name the rough translation given was 'knowing follower', which suits the purpose of this character pretty well. If there's anyone who knows otherwise for sure, feel free to correct me.


	11. Call me Leona

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If all goes well i should be able to update twice a week. Of course this depends on schoolwork and previous engagements: currently I'm out of the house until 7 on three nights of the five school nights. I'm planning to update all of my active fics (there are only two, i'm not that impressive) each Monday, then maybe again at some point during the week if i have enough material and/or time.   
> But finally, the guy i presume we've all been waiting for, we get a Leo chapter.

“I’m having a weird dream, right? Tell me I’m having a weird dream. Tell me these tits are not real.” he peels back his shirt collar and glances down, just in case the offending equipment might have disappeared sometime in the last ten seconds since he checked. “It really looks like I have tits. Gods above, I know I’m scrawny but you think girl-me would be able to manage more than…than…what am I, a triple A-cup? This disappoints me! These aren’t even tits, these are swollen nipples and now I’m doing that thing where I get super-confused and scared at the same time and my only options are either to babble my way through it or have a panic attack. Or maybe just fall over and hope no one steps on me until the fight is over. Do you ever get that? I get it all the time. It’s sorta my thing since I died. I mean I died once, but I was fine. Hurt like a bitch. Couldn’t get the smell of smoke off my skin for days and then when I finally got rid of it, I kind of missed it, even though I did smell of barbeque incense. You know what I mean?”  
The giant’s jaw still hangs open. Evidently, he hasn’t got the slightest clue what Leo is saying despite having listened to Leo fear-ramble for going on a four solid minutes now. Leo’s record for distracting the enemy with one of his terrified soliloquies stands at an amazing ten minutes. In that battle, the plan was for Percy to sneak around the back and attack the enemy from the rear/in the rear, but even Percy was stupefied by the torrent of nonsense coming out of Leo’s mouth.  
He hasn’t always had this problem. Lately, whenever he opens his mouth just before a battle is about to erupt he just can’t seem to shut it. He actually needs help closing his mouth. Even if he’s fighting he will keep right on talking unless he’s made physically unable by the enemy or by a friend with some duct tape.   
Then again, Leo hasn’t always had tits, or hips, or long blonde hair, or white-ish skin. He doubts he has ever been a girl before either.   
He relays this sentiment to the giant, who’s spiked club is dangling limply from his hand, and who’s eyes are so wide with shock Leo’s afraid they’re going to whizz out of the thing’s skull.   
“Also, I’ve never woken up in a ruined city before. I’ve woken up in all kinds of crazy places. Up trees, on dragons and this one really weird time in my boyfriend’s ex’s bed –gods that was a weird Monday- but I’ve never woken up in a…what is this, Walking Dead chic? Hey look, there’s a zombie.”  
Leo points over the giant’s shoulder. The giant, bless his soupy, peanut-sized brain, turns around to follow Leo’s finger and Leo seizes the opportunity to get his newly feminine ass out of there. He shoots down the cracked street, hurdling over the obstacles of the shells of cars and the flanks of rotted buildings, and makes it a complete block before he hears the giant’s indignant “HEY!!”  
“I love it when babbling works.” Leo grins “Not that I can help the babbling, but I love it when it works in my favour instead of getting me crushed.”  
If you ask Leo what the hell has happened to him, he would tell you he had no gods-damned idea and then proceed to explain in excruciating detail what was confusing him, why, how and what one time it reminded him of, apologising profusely all the while with his assurances that he would like to stop talking but doesn’t think he can at the moment.  
What happened to Leo is as follows: he woke up about two hours ago underneath a statue of some person that had somehow survived the ruin of the city around it. He wriggled his way into the light and surveyed his surroundings and immediately surmised he must be dreaming. As the day wore on and the monster attacks became more and more frequent, Leo became less convinced of this. he tried several times to wake himself up with pinches, by sticking his head in a cold river that was running through the centre of a gutted mall and even by clicking his shoes together. It took him quite a while to notice he was no longer a young Latino man, but for some reason, a young European-looking woman.  
For the first time in his life, Leo has an ass he has to worry about catching on things. Honestly, this has been the most alarming part of the experience for him; to turn around to check his belt isn’t slipping over his hips and find something is attached to him. A couple times he thought it was a hostile entity and tried to crush it on a wall, which ended up looking really weird.  
Yeah.  
This really is what Leo is most worried about. Not the apocalyptic setting, or the hordes of monsters boiling out of the crumbling skyscrapers every few minutes to have a crack at killing him, or being unable to remember how he got where he is, or having what appears to be the contents of his workshop packed into his tool-belt, or not getting a signal on his phone or anything else.  
He’s terrified because he suddenly has an ass.  
Also, he really hopes none of these monsters can read minds, because they’ll judge the hell out of him when they see how he has his priorities listed.  
Meanwhile, back in reality, the giant is thundering after him.   
Leo doesn’t worry much about being caught. His long legs and streamlined shape pretty much ensure an escape on-foot, no matter how big his opponent is. He’s become fast as fuck too ever since he died. It’s weird the way he discovered all these interesting things about himself after he came back, like how he can move like the wind when he needs to and that he’s allergic to bees (what a fun afternoon for everyone that was).  
“COME BACK HERE!!” demands the giant from about a block behind him.  
Leo wonders what kind of a moron you have to be to expect that to work.  
He ducks into the doorframe of a ruined apartment block and draws his hammer. The giant pounds past half a moment later and Leo takes its legs out with a single, brutal blow to its right kneecap. Crashing down, the giant drops its club and ends up crushing its own skulls before Leo has a chance to finish him off. The body shudders and liquefies, turning to sluggish mud and wet sand. This keeps happening. Of course the giant is going to reform in about four or five minutes, but that gives Leo plenty of time to pick a new direction.  
“So,” he nudges the slag heap with his foot “Doors of Death must be open again. That sucks. We needed a whole fucking prophecy to get the thing shut last time. I’m too damned old for this. Yeah, nineteen is definitely a retiring age.”  
A drakon slithers out of the cracked roof of a nearby building. Wherever its pale underbelly touches, a path of bubbling rot is left in its wake. Leo lifts a hand and casually blasts the drakon to ashes with a fireball.  
“What the fuck did I just say? I’m retired. Go bother someone else.”  
He walks away from the slag heap and the ashes and tries calling Nico again. Funny: normally he can always rely on his boyfriend to pick up his phone, although as a rule Nico considers most technology to be an invention of the corporate devil trying to steal his soul. Normally, Leo isn’t a girl. Obviously this isn’t a normal day, but he calls Nico again anyway and leaves his fifth voicemail.  
“Me again guapo. I still have boobs and I’m still lost on a Walking Dead set. I think the Doors of Death are open for business. Everything I kill comes back for seconds. It’d be really great to know you’re not dead, so call me back when you can. Also lemme know if you can get anyone else on the phone, because I can’t even get through to anyone but you. Jeez, I really hope I didn’t sleep through the end of the world. Ok, I’m gonna hang up now. Love you, bye.”  
He passes one of the few glass-fronts which are still intact and wipes a hole in the coat of soot over it, staring at himself. Herself. It’s a herself on the outside, but a himself on the inside. If this is a dream Leo wonders if his subconscious might be hinting at some kind of gender dysmorphia buried deep in his physce. He doubts it. He likes being a boy.  
But that is definitely not a boy. That’s a slim, tall girl, model- sized in her proportions. Photoshop some boobs on this girl, air-brush the scars off her skin and maybe bleach the slight olive tint out of her skin and she’s a Victoria’s Secret model. Leo is dressed in clothes he recognises. The grey jeans ripped open at the knees for better mobility, the tank-top with a faded bat signal on it that is showing off way too much of what little side-boob there is to show off (he doesn’t have a bra an realistically doesn’t need one), the thick gloves he uses in the forge, the suspenders holding his heavy belt up and the black battered pair of tennis shoes he wore through most of the war with Gaia and has refused to throw away since.  
It’s like someone meant to change his clothes, but messed up and ended up changing his skin. It feels disgusting too. He isn’t meant to look this way. He doesn’t want to look this way. Bile rises in his throat at the mere sound of his voice, which has changed into a flat, unamused one he can’t seem to sound happy with that has a weird accent that bites all the vowels on the way out.  
Worst of all is his face. Whoever changed him has removed his scar from the equation- the scar from the wound that gouged his left eye right out of his skull. This girl has two healthy, organic eyes. Leo can still hear his artificial eye whirring inside his head and the faint, blue grids it projects over one side of his field of vision to help with his depth perception is definitely still there, but he feels weirdly cheated anyway.  
“I’d like to wake up now.” he says to his reflection.  
He smiles, and even that looks horribly unnatural. “Or smile convincingly at least.” he tilts his head to the side and the girl does the same “I think I’m going to call you Leona. That way I can still go by Leo. Or maybe I should come up with an alias? Hey! What if Hazel disguised me?” his head aches with confusion. “This reeks of Hazel. Oh my gods, I am going to kick her so hard when I see her next. If she was going to disguise me she could make me into something a little less…evil looking. Fuck me, I look like the first girl James Bond gets with who turns out to be evil and dies, like in every fucking movie. This is horrible. Dammit Hazel.”  
Leo is so distracted by his reflection he misses the horde of zombies gathering around him until one of them lurches into the reflection over his shoulder, Leo jumps.  
“Sweet sweaty Hephaestus it is the Walking Dead!”  
There is no other word for them than zombies. Slow, stumbling things dressed in blood and the rags of the clothes they wore when they died. Many of them are in the shreds of hospital gowns and pyjamas and a couple are totally naked. What catches Leo’s eyes are what the rest of them are wearing. It takes him a moment to identify the uniform underneath the grime and gore, but as they draw closer he realises five of the zombies are dressed in the armour he remembers seeing on the Amazon warriors. One of the male zombies has a collar around his neck. Panic flares in his chest and he searches the ranks for an orange or a purple shirt.  
None that he can see.  
“I should probably kill you guys, huh?”  
The streets are full of them. More and more stagger out of the wreckage. Why do they always come in such crazy numbers, like a zombie flash-mob? They must know not all of them are going to get a piece –Leo hasn’t got much meat to go around even with the addition of slight breasts and a butt. Are they just copying what they saw in the movies and TV? Well, going from what he’s seen on the movies and TV it’s probably not smart to light them all on fire. Leo may be fire-proof but that doesn’t mean flaming zombies are going to be any easier to deal with.  
He hefts his hammer and readies himself for the first swing.  
“LEO!!”  
He reels back in shock. In his confusion, he thinks the gaping zombie he is about to strike has called out to him. A shadow falls over him. He looks up and sees a Pegasus streaking to the ground. Whatever happens next is anyone’s guess. One minute he’s on the ground surrounded by zombies and the next minute his arms are around Reyna’s waist and they’re riding Scipio, that’s right, her dead Pegasus, to the safety of a nearby rooftop.  
“Hi.” is the first intelligent, coherent thought Leo can extract from the fog in his mind.  
He can hear the tears in her voice “You bastard. That’s the only thing you can think to say to me after sixty years?”  
“I’ve been turned into a white chick.”  
She laughs over the roar of the wind “Gods I missed you. I take it that enormous fireball that shot up over the city a little while ago was your doing?”  
“Yep!” Leo watches the city rush by underneath them and points out a site where it looks like a bomb detonated only moments ago “This giant crab came at me from nowhere.”  
“Somebody finally got rid of Karkat? That’s great! That thing has been terrorising us for months!”  
“Rey, not that I’m not happy to go into the subtle nuances of that Jason Joke right there, but do you think you could tell me what the hell is going on? Where are we going?”  
She turns around to smile at him, which is more of a grimace “You’ll see.”


	12. A week before the end of the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for the shippers: this next chapter is a little heavy on the Valdangelo, but their conversation is relevant to some things we've seen in the earlier chapter. If you're the type of shipper who doesn't like to look at material not from your ship, just try to look past those bits.  
> Also, in honor of this being our twelfth chapter, we're taking a brief trip to Olympus

The storm that had been brewing all afternoon finally broke.  
When it did, the rain came in pelting sheets, the lightning in blinding flashes and the thunder in great, rumbling roars like a beast was crouched on top of the low-hanging clouds and making its displeasure apparent. Leo and Nico are caught as they walk across the archery pitch. Nico grabs Leo by the hand and makes a break for a nearby shed where the bows and arrows are stored between practises.   
“We have incurred the wrath of the gods!” shouts Leo over the thunder, laughing all the way.  
“You’re gonna get us struck by lightning!” replies Nico.  
Amazingly, they make it to the porch of the shed without being smote. Ever the gentleman, Nico holds the door open for Leo before he goes inside. He has to fight against a fierce wind to get the door shut.   
“Soaked to the skin.” observes Leo.  
He struggles out of his shirt and wrings out a sizeable puddle onto the floorboards. Then he slings it over the shaft of a spear and beckons to Nico, who is already shivering badly. He pulls the younger demigod into a warm hug to ease the chill.  
“You should take your shirt off.” he advises.  
“You just want me to undress.” mutters Nico, but he peels his shirt off.  
Thunder cracks almost directly over the shed. Flinching, Nico closes all the gaps between them and threads his thin arms around Leo’s neck.  
“No. Stop. What are you doing? Can you not see it is the gay that angered the mighty gods in the first place?” Leo jokes, pretending to shove him away “You and your affections, di Angelo, you’re going to be the death of me.”  
“How is it so fucking cold?” grumbles Nico.  
He looks over Leo’s shoulder out the window. The grounds of Camp Half-blood have been wiped out in a grey, driving rain. Lightning flashes in the clouds overhead, but thankfully the wards against the worst of the weather will keep most of the bolts from touching down within the camp limits. It’s truly something special to watch a bolt touch the invisible dome a couple hundred feet over the camp. The energy fizzes and breaks up into smaller webs of electricity which flow off to the sides, like water running off a duck’s back. After a violent storm the grass and soil at the edges of the boundaries are often scorched.  
With or without the lightning, the two of them are trapped in the shed unless they want to brave that painful rain. It’s so much like a contrived, confessional scene in a bad romance movie it makes Nico wonder if a certain someone up there, beyond the clouds is messing with him. Good thing he and Leo have already passed most of their big milestones, otherwise he’d probably end up losing his virginity in the shed. If he still had virginity to lose.  
“What are you smirking about?” asks Leo.  
“Nothing.” Nico smirks.  
“I think you’re smirking.”  
“Hey, I’m supposed to be the delusional one in this couple.”   
A couple of minutes pass while they listen to the rain pound on the ceiling and the thunder, like a drumroll. Sometimes the thunder is so close it makes the floor hum.  
“What were you saying, by the way? Before the heavens opened up.”  
Nico extricates himself from Leo’s arms and perches on a crate pushed up to the window. He gestures to a crate opposite it, which disappoints Leo.  
“What? Do I offend you?”   
“No. I’ve overheated now, actually. I presume I was talking about something dead, right?” he takes a second to pick up his train of thought “Oh yeah, zombies. I’m afraid I have to dash your hopes of becoming Sheriff Rick. The zombies you’re talking about would need some pretty special, unusual and altogether impossible conditions to exist.”  
Leo grins “I love it when you talk nerdy about dead stuff.”  
“You have some weird turn-ons.” says Nico with a straight face, which takes a lot of work to maintain around Leo “You were talking about dead bodies rampaging with wild abandon, right? About a virus that infects an entire world and knocks humanity to its knees.”  
“Yeah except I hadn’t phrased it so poetically in my head. I was just wondering how your zombies worked. Your dad’s too…speaking of him, have you…”  
“No. Not recently.” Nico squints out the window and sighs in spite of himself “You know him. It’s not really appropriate to call or write unless he starts it.”  
Leo had hoped the gods might be less shy about contacting their children after the War on Gaia. But as it turns out, and it does every time, the gods are less concerned about their children once a quest is finished and the world, the gods and everything else have been narrowly saved again. The chaos and frantic pace of quests tend to make Leo forget how quiet the gods normally are. He can’t remember the last time he talked to Hephaestus. It was probably three months back, when the four –year- old aspiring arsonist Ross Tsu was dumped on the camps’ figurative doorstep and Leo had prayed to his father, asking if Ross was a half-brother of his and possibly afflicted with Leo’s curse too. Turned out Ross was one of Janus’s and he just really, really liked playing with fire.   
With Nico, it’s more difficult because he has an empty cabin most of the time. He and Hazel keep up a constant correspondence and visit each other often. That’s fine. That’s great. But that doesn’t change the fact that Nico only has one blood relative in the living world, while most of the rest of his friends are drowning in half-siblings.   
Maybe it no longer bothers Nico as much as Leo thinks it does. He does have a super-low tolerance for his boyfriend’s pain, after all.  
“You’re pulling a face.” says Nico.  
“Look who’s slinging around the accusations now. Gods, what a hypocrite.”  
Early on in their relationship, they figured out the best way to communicate was through a series of gently teasing jibes. Neither of them really appreciated being smothered or constantly reminded of how much they are loved, so it works out perfectly. According to Piper, it’s what makes them the cutest couple ever in the history of all couples and Jason has a right to still be stoked that they’re together almost two years after they became official. Piper does tend to gush about matters of love, despite her determination to reject her heritage as a daughter of a love goddess.  
Especially gay love.  
For the life of him, Leo will never understand why a gay relationship can only be viewed from the polar opposites of a spectrum, which is ‘ultra-gross ew, yuck, sinful sinners’ at one end and ‘aaw look they don’t give a shit, so kawaii, lemme show Tumblr’ at the other.   
Nico looks tired “Can we not talk about my literally dead-beat dad for now? I’d rather talk about the undead.”  
Leo gestures for him to go on. He is genuinely interested “Sure. Go ahead. Blow me…away.”  
This earns half a smile, and that’s good enough for Leo “Ok that was so shameless I’m not even going to acknowledge it with a retort. Zombies. The type of zombie you’re talking about are strictly mythical so far. See, when you’re using an army of the undead a certain amount of energy goes into pulling them out of the ground and moving them around. Normal demigods (Leo snorts) can’t see it, but when I look at the undead I can see the…I don’t know, the cords of energy holding them together? They glow at the joints. It takes some serious concentration to use a zombie. The more you have going at once, the less durable they are. That’s why it’s better to bring them out in small numbers, because they ultimately turn out stronger. Unless you’re Hades. If you’re Hades you get to fart in the face of the rules and call it talent.”  
Leo laughs “So you mean the less there is, the better? How come you never reanimate just one and pour all your, uh, juice into it to make it Zombie-zilla?”  
Nico flushes, embarrassed “Oh, um, I’m not quite good enough yet to do that. You have to re-flesh the object practically all the way if you want to do that…you remember Frank told us about that undead soldier Mars gave him on his first quest, Grey? If you create an undead soldier with that much power they tend to get a little bit antsy. They’ll question your rule and challenge you at every turn. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. I prefer to stick to the basics: knot of strong zombies, terrify the enemy, maybe throw a couple of ghosts at them if I’m going for a strong impression.”  
“You don’t need help for that.”  
“Bottom line is I’m bad at exerting control over other people.” he shrugs “Even if those people happen to be brainless zombies.”  
Leo puts his hand up “I have a question, Professor.”  
He gives him a sly look “Your shirt stays off.”  
“Whoa horn-ball, I was just gonna ask what it would take to have a real live-dead zombie wandering around, like the stuff Sheriff Rick guns down.”  
“Hypothetically…I guess if you wanted to raise a bunch at the same time you’d have to make a hive mind and program a couple of base instincts in from the primal soup. One of them would have to be to seek out a food source, which would be stuff like you and me.”  
A massive thunder-clap cuts him off. Both of them jump as if the roof is going to fall in on them. The naked light-bulb that bathes the shed in a weak light flickers on and off, then goes out entirely and plunges them into a half darkness. Without missing a beat Leo opens his palm and flicks a little ball of flame up into the air. It hovers between them.  
“What do you think is going on?” asks Nico almost timidly.  
“A fight? You know what the Olympians are like. Big, super-powered dysfunctional family. Like the Kardashians if they had control over the elements.”  
“Are you trying to terrify me?”  
Leo spreads his arms “We’re hiding in a dilapidated shed by the edge of the woods, in the middle of a thunderstorm talking about zombies around a sort of campfire, and we’re both shirtless and ethnic and sexual minorities. The only way we could scream ‘KILL US NOW’ any louder was if we started going at it.”  
“Point taken. By the way, what’s with the sudden, violent interest in zombies?”  
“Dude, it’d be weird and creepy if I didn’t ask you about zombies sometimes. Also kind of selfish. I’m supposed to take an interest in your interests, no matter how weird they are. Ok if you got into necrophilia then I’d have to make some noise, but what’s pulling a harmless little Lazarus now and then?”  
Nico shrugs “It does kind of flaunt the laws of nature. I’m pretty sure Nat doesn’t like me.”  
“He won’t like you if he ever finds out you call him ‘Nat’ instead of ‘Thanatos’ like the rest of us death-fearing people. Back on the subject of the undead, so am I right in thinking that there would have to be one, uh, Queen bitch heading up the operation? Someone with immense powers and skills in necromancy and probably extremely stunted social skills?”  
Nico nods.  
“So…you in ten years.”  
His boyfriend rolls his eyes “You’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”  
Satisfied that he has had a decent crash-course in zombie logic, Leo asks Nico what he thought of the last meeting of the Heads of Cabin which ended in a duel, but also yielded a more productive decision which will change a lot in both the Roman and Greek camps.   
And the storm persists

-Mount Olympus-

When Ares bursts into the throne room, none of the gods inside look up. Ares bursts into every room. Wherever he goes, he leaves a trail of splintered doors hanging from their hinges in his wake. Generally, his red-hot aura of rage and bloodlust can be felt a couple hundred feet around him in every direction. Most gods feel the sudden, almost irresistible urge to punch someone in the face and note that Ares is coming long before they see him, or even hear his footsteps pounding down the hallway.  
Knowing this, Ares is still disappointed that Athena, Hermes and Hephaestus don’t jump out of their skins as he kicks the doors open.  
“…PIECEOFSHITWHATWEREYOUTHINKINGICANNOTBELIEVEYOUWOULDDOSOMETHINGSOPIGHEADEDLYSTUPIDI’MCUTTINGYOURIGHTTHEFUCKOUTOFTHEINHEIRETANCE…” Zeus is saying.  
“WHAT’S ALL THAT NOISE?!” he demands at the top of his voice.  
Athena glances up from her book coolly “You have been the subject of one of Father’s little fits so many times I’m surprised you don’t recognise the sound.”  
Hephaestus rubs one of his metal-encased kneecaps and grimaces “Wish he didn’t have to whip up such a fierce storm every time one of us toes the line. Makes my knee caps ache like nobody’s business.”  
“Pronouns,” Athena reprimands him “You mean ‘I wish-‘.”  
“Meant what I said.” rumbles Hephaestus.  
“…MELONHEADEDHAMFISTEDMORONICSOCIALLYCHALLENGEDINSECUREIFYOUDONTHAVEADOZENPRETTYBITCHESHOLDINGYOURHNDYOUCANTFEELGOODABOUTYOURSELF…”Zeus continues.  
Ares bristles, partially because he has been dismissed and partially because he has forgotten what a pronoun is and thinks it might be an insult. He strides to Athena’s throne, jams his face in hers and thumps his fists so hard on the arm-rests that they crack.   
“What. Is. That. Noise.” he spits out each word and flecks Athena’s face a little.  
She calmly plants a hand in his face, standing up, and holds him at arm’s length. His arms wind-mill. He absolutely hates it when she does this, with such a violent passion that both his Roman and Greek children, wherever they may be, are all compelled to crack their heads on the nearest surface.  
(At Camp Jupiter Frank Zhang has just split his desk down the middle and at Camp Half-blood Clarisse LaRue head-butts a hole in a stone wall.)  
Mostly he just hates that one of the gods, especially Athena, can still get the drop on him.  
Athena releases him with a slight shove then wipes her hand in disgust on Hephaestus’s scorched forge-apron.   
“…SMARTLIKEYOURTWINSISTERSHEMUSTHAVEEATENALLYOURBRAINSINTHEWOMBANDGAIAKNOWSYOUDESERVEITAFTERTHIS…”  
Hermes unplugs one of his earbuds and says “The Big Z caught Olympus’s Golden Boy talking to one of the Eastern gang.”  
“He…what?” replies Ares.  
Hermes passes a hand over his face and changes his head into that of a hawk’s “This guy. Remember this guy? What’s-his-face with the kilt and the dead daddy.”  
“You mean Ho-.”  
“NO!!” cry the other three gods at once.  
“Did you forget AGAIN that we are forbidden from invoking their names?” Athena gestures around them “In the bloody throne room of all the settings!”  
Hermes pats his chest “Be still my throbbing heart. Darkness of Erebos, Ares, how stupid are you?”  
In a rare moment of surprise, Ares totally forgets to pound Hermes’ face to dust for dropping the ‘s’-bomb on him. He scratches his head, then removes his helmet and tries it again, looking towards the roof where the yelling is coming from. What the mortals will hear as rolls of thunder is the soundtrack of Zeus screaming at his son, berating him for an infringement of the Divine Laws, for acting like a love-sick puppy even countless millennia after whatever the fuck it was he and bird-boy had ended and for leaving rings on the furniture because he can’t remember to use a damned coaster. The screams are interspersed with brief, quiet apologies from Apollo, who doesn’t sound the least bit sorry, but rather to be waiting for Zeus to finish his attempt at parenting so he can go back to being awesome.  
“…TINYPENISANDSHAGGYHAIRANDSMELLSLIKECARRIONWHYDONTYOUJUSTGOOUTWITHSOMEBODYNICELIKEONEOFTHENYMPHSORKNOCKUPANOTHERMORTALWOMANOREVENAMORTALMANGOONIDAREYUGOAHEADANDTRYITIWILLBEIMPRESSEDIFYOUCAN…” Zeus is starting to sound a little hoarse by now.  
Among the things Ares doesn’t understand is why Zeus always drags the subject of his wrath up to the roof of the dome of the throne room to admonish them. Maybe it’s because that dome is the highest point of Olympus, the Acropolis of the city in some ways, and the acoustics mean everyone can hear the trouble-maker being humiliated? Zeus’ temper-tantrums (or ‘tempest tantrums’, considering the effect they have on the weather) wake up the entire mountain every time. Ares knows from experience that most of the city’s residents will be cowering under tables and in doorways, waiting for the drama to end  
“…EVERDOTHATAGAINIWILLEATYOURPRECIOUSBOVINESFORABABERBEQUEORSENDYOUTOWORKASUMMERWITHYOURUNCLEHADESWOULDYOUFUCKINGLIKETHAT?SUMMERWITHUNCLEHADES?HEDSETYOUSTRAIGHTINNOTIMEATALLMYLADICANTELLYOUTHATMUCH…”  
Figuring it is Zeus’s turn to pitch a fit; Ares slouches into his throne and pulls out a magazine concerning ‘guns, god and guts’ according to the tagline.


	13. Call me Equius

“Who is that?”  
“Who is who?”  
“That woman everyone is staring at, with Lady Ahklys. I’ve never seen her before.”  
“The dracaena? Don’t know, but she must have had a blessing from Lady Periboia. No one is that radiant naturally.”  
“Ah, you’re just jealous you old bitch.”  
“Who are you talking about?”  
The twin empousai glance up a fair distance to meet Polybotes’ single, milky eye. One of them points to a couple that have the dance-floor to themselves. Squinting, Polybotes recognises the drained white colour of Ahklys’ long braid and skin. He shudders at the sight of the misery goddess. After being blinded twice, he knows her very well. However, he doesn’t know the dracaena she is dancing with. He wishes he did. Even with his poor eye-sight he can tell the monster is absolutely beautiful, with long sheets of luxuriant brown hair hanging over her shoulders, a strong, full frame and dazzling eyes that seem to change colour even as he watches. Ahklys is clearly smitten. The ghostly, dour approximation of a smile on her lips brings some life into her dull eyes, shaving the years off her face.   
Most of the monsters in the room have stopped to watch the couple, who are oblivious to the attention they are attracting. Everyone in the room is finely dressed in the glossy pelts of exotic animals and shining armour and draped with precious metals, but the dracaena somehow puts each of the outfits to shame in a simple, white dress that compliments her curvy shape very well. Whispers pass around the crowd as the party-goers try to figure out who the woman is. So far, no worthwhile results have been yielded. Polybotes notices a couple of pull and pinch at their finery, as if jealous. He understands. He’d give up his eye again to have a chance at a dance with the dracaena in the goddess’s arms.  
Meanwhile on the dance-floor, Ahklys is in the process of falling in love for the first time in a couple millennia.   
“I don’t understand how I could have missed you all these years…you say you’ve been working under Nyx for how long again?”  
The dracaena smiles indulgently, as if she wants nothing more than to regurgitate trivial information while Ahklys drools “Ten wonderful years.”  
Her voice is perfect: like the voice Ahklys uses to whisper into a child’s nightmare, a voice that convinces them of the reality of the beasts under their beds and in their closets. Ahklys was totally at sea for this dracaena the moment she heard that voice. And she doesn’t even know her name yet.  
“This…well, I want to ask your name,” stammers out the goddess, feeling foolish “Isn’t that strange? I haven’t even asked your name.”  
If the goddess weren’t completely smitten, she might have noticed the flicker of panic that flits over the monster’s face “My name is…well, wouldn’t that take away from the atmosphere? From the magic of dancing with a beautiful stranger?”  
Ahklys’s bloodless face flushes gold for the first time since she was a young girl “Oh-yes-but, but you already know who I am, right?”  
The dracaena leans in, her chest pressing against Ahklys, her breath smelling of sweet mint “I could never mistake you for any other, my lady.”  
Ahklys practically swoons on the spot, but she manages to control herself “Then I suppose we’re not strangers, after all, you have worked for my mother for many years.”  
The dracaena swallows “My name is Zahhak…Equius Zahhak.”  
The goddess is enchanted “It suits you well.”  
‘Equius’ pauses to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow “I am very flattered milady. I suppose it does.”  
The song is coming to an end and with it, Ahklys feels her world too. She has only just met this amazing woman, this strange ‘Equius’, but as she already explained when Ahklys worked up the nerve to ask her to dance, Equius will have to leave at the end of the song. Ahklys takes a good, hard look at her and makes a decision: she can’t let this one slip away.  
“I understand you have a pressing engagement after this and I do not seek to hold you from it, but…do you think you could…give me a token to remember you by? At least something I can use to find you after tonight.”  
Equius’s internal debate is clear on her beautiful, perfect face. Before she can reply the song ends, the last beat echoing in Ahklys’ withered heart like a gong. Then her heart inflates again a little bit when Equius tugs her to the side (the crowd still mesmerised by the courting they watch) and scrawls a number on the inside of Ahklys’ arm with a pen pulled from her bosom.  
“My contact details.” she draws close to Ahklys. “And a token to remember me by.”  
Later, those party-goers who saw the kiss will swear Equius Zahhak, the dracaena’s shape flickered for the briefest of seconds, and the shape that replaced her was that of Aphrodite herself. As for Ahklys, she will cherish this moment for the rest of the eternity left to her.  
Equius breaks away too quickly. She bows and whirls away into the crowd. She passes by Polybotes on the way out, leaving a scent like wild-flowers behind her which the giant inhales greedily. And she is gone.  
Ahklys stands where she was left. Her heart swells and she is completely in love.

As for ‘Equius’, she quietly congratulates herself as she slithers across the dark, leafy grounds of the palace for her stellar performance. She’s just glad none of her friends were there to see that. Leo would never let her live it down. And Jason? He’d be over the moon with the proof that she actually pays attention to his nerdy tirades enough to remember the name of one of his ‘needs more screen time’ favourite characters from whatever that web-comic is he reads obsessively. So much so that he probably wouldn’t care his girlfriend just gave the goddess of misery tongue in front of a monster ball.   
As the more perceptive among us might have guessed, Equius Zahhak is actually Piper McLean, a demigod who for some reason found herself awaking in a dungeon deep in the castle she has just left, which looks suspiciously like Hogwarts. When she heard the party upstairs, she figured since she was disguised very convincingly as a monster she should go up and join their throng and maybe figure out what the ever-loving fuck she is doing here. By some weird twists of luck she ended up dancing with the incarnation of misery herself. Obviously, the goddess was quite stunned and taken by the beauty of this Mist-fit she wears. The moment Piper saw the party-goers she turned her patented Aphrodite love-magic to the highest setting, terrified that she would be killed or sussed as a demigod if everyone wasn’t too blown away by her looks to notice.  
“Well that was weird.” she shivers at the hissing, creeping sound of her voice.  
It makes her skin crawl. Piper would be scared by the form she wears if she hadn’t realised it was Hazel’s work. She knows the feel of one of Hazel’s Mist-fits. She has seen Hazel at it enough times to be familiar with them. To cheer herself up, she thinks about last Halloween when Hazel disguised herself as Jeff the Killer and sneaked around the camp, jumping out of dark corners to scare the living shit out of the other campers. The highlight of that day was definitely when Hazel shook Percy gently awake from his nap, then kissed him on the cheek with a split mouth weeping blood and told him to go back to sleep. Percy knocked the couch over backwards in his effort to get away.  
Where are her friends anyway? When she woke up, piper didn’t have anything on her but her trusty old Cornucopia jammed in the back of her belt.  
She stops at the edge of the forest that borders the castle and looks back to the towers. They are the only lights in the night. There are no guards on the ramparts, although it seems like there should be. She guesses the guests are trusted to protect themselves – a lot of them were toting around clubs as big as she is.  
She thinks about Ahklys, and shivers. Initially she had planned to make a run for it as soon as she caught sight of the doors, but her charms attracted one of the last people Piper ever would have wanted to dance with, if she had to choose from the party. The goddess made her stomach drop all the way to her feet, her heart plummet like she had just lost someone she loved dearly. Misery poured out of the goddess’s pores, along with a heavy perfume smelling of cashews for some reason. Piper figured the last thing she needed was the misery goddess hounding her down, so she indulged the goddess and danced with her. She did her best to be extra-charming, pretending the entire time that Ahklys was Jason under an extremely effective Mist-fit. It made kissing Ahklys slightly easier.  
The number she wrote inside the goddess’s arm is the number of her favourite Vietnamese restaurant. If the goddess tries to use it, assuming monsters and gods use cell-phones sometimes, she’ll end up scaring the crap out of some poor waiter. Or maybe she’ll start a new love affair. The pho soup that place serves is beyond delicious.  
Piper stops. She’s not sure what has her set on edge, but suddenly the hairs on the back of her (scaly) neck are prickling, and a strange feeling like pins and needles spreads through the twin columns of her tails.  
She knows that feeling.  
But she doesn’t let herself say it out loud.  
She turns into the impenetrable darkness of the forest and melts into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. My fandoms are showing.  
> Piper would be the best wing-man for picking up chicks. She just turns on the old Aphrodite charm and you're suddenly covered in bitches.


	14. Percy Jackson...right?

For one truly horrifying moment, Percy is sure he has wet the bed.  
He hasn’t wet the bed since he was 7 years old- and that was the night his mother fell in front of the TV and left it on a late-night showing of the ‘Night of the Living dead’, the old black and white version which scared little Percy so badly he actually wet himself instead of getting out of bed in the dark to make the short trek to the bathroom. Cold with dread, Percy props himself up on his elbows to inspect the damage. With a stab of real terror, he realises his face is wet and his clothes are dripping.   
A girl’s voice directly over him lets out a shriek and there’s a splash in about the same second that it clicks and Percy figures out he’s actually in water. A river. A filthy, grey river smelling of sulphur and smoke and the entire laundry load from the Ares cabin after a long session of Capture the flag. The condition of the water is so foul it’s almost as bad as waking up covered in his own urine. Percy leaps to his feet, coming up to his calves at the bank of the churning river. It reminds him of the Styx, and the acidic effect of the water on his skin is starting to feel like that one time he took a dip in it. But that shouldn’t be possible. He still wears the blessing. Nothing can hurt him, let alone water, which normally doesn’t hurt him not matter how tainted.  
He hurls himself to the sandy bank (on closer inspection, this is in fact ash) and rolls around until his skin stops burning. When he stops, he finds himself at the feet of a sickly looking, grey-skinned girl that has to be the spirit of this river. Screws and hypodermic syringes are tangled in her stringy black hair. She is dressed in the rags of a filthy sack which doesn’t leave all that much to the imagination –not that nymphs of any kind have ever been celebrated for their modesty.  
“Who are you?” she demands, waving a wet stick in an attempt to appear threatening.  
With her general drowned-junkie vibe, it succeeds. Percy takes a couple of steps back “I’m no one important.”  
This is a lie and he knows it, but he’s found it’s better to pretend not to be Percy Jackson when he’s asked.   
“What are you doing in my territory?”  
She shoves her face into his, bringing with her a smell like an ocean of rotting fish that almost knocks him over. The naiad squints. She puts her hand under his chin and tilts his head from side-to-side. Then her eyes grow wide and misty.  
“I smell the sea on you…is that you, Perseus?”  
“Uh. No.”  
“I think it’s you.”  
She reaches into his pocket and pulls out a ballpoint pen, reading ‘Riptide’ on the side. Shit. Shit. Shit. Percy snatches it back and stuffs it in his pocket, backing away. His mind switches into over-drive as he tries to figure out how she knows him. There were so many new faces after the battle for Olympus, so many spirits and demigods and minor gods introducing themselves and thanking him for his efforts he just couldn’t absorb them all.  
“Ok, it’s me.” he admits “Are you from the camp?”  
The naiad’s brow furrows. She points to a completely massive complex crouched on the opposite bank Percy somehow missed. It looks like a cross between a high-security prison, a meat-packing plant and a slaughter-house. Barbed wire tops a 30 or 40ft mesh fence, which is surrounded by concrete walls of half the height. There are several structures like giant warehouses or jet hangers inside the two fences, and several smoke-stacks jut out of the roves like arrows and belch ash into the cloudy sky, which must be what has polluted the river so badly.  
“Holy shit.” are the only words that come to mind.  
“That’s where I come from.” he follows her finger to a jet of black water spewing out of a pipe mounted in the side of the concrete wall, stemming from one of the warehouses “I’m bathwater and flushed water and the stuff that went down the drains, all from the last 30 years. I used to be someone else. I used to have better neighbours.”  
It clicks again “You’re the naiad who lived by Geryon’s stables.”  
“Still am.” says the naiad dryly.  
The way Percy remember Geryon’s stables is as the typical, run-of-the-mill ranch crowded with the sleek golden cows of Apollo. Also, there was a guy with three torsos who tried to barbeque his friends, if he’s remembering it correctly.   
“This is impossible,” he stares slack-jawed at the other bank “I…I was here just last year. There’s no way this could change so much.”  
“Nah. It’s been like this for thirty years.” the naiad flips her hair and wrings a few dead fish out “You’re behind the times. Where’ve you been the last sixty years anyway? We coulda used you around.”  
Feeling faint, Percy lowers himself to the bank and takes a few deep breaths, which is a mistake considering the quality of the air. “Sixty years?” he repeats “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
The naiad shrugs “I’m sorry for not weeping tears of the purest brine and throwing myself at your feet, but I’m kinda in a bad mood.”  
Percy looks down at his hands. His heart leaps into his throat. His thumb, fore-finger and middle finger are made of metal. Literally, metal, like a robot’s. He holds his hand at arm’s length and flexes the metal fingers. They move smoothly, noiselessly, as if they were just as much a part of his flesh as the rest of his fingers. He sees a dark strand in his wrist alongside the veins. There’s a wire in him. Nausea makes the world turn back-flips. He checks the rest of him frantically for other alterations, and finds he barely recognises himself.  
The baby-fat has been stripped right off him. Not a trace of padding remains between his ribs, his chest and stomach are taut and tight like in those stupid warrior movies where the protagonist runs around glossy and topless for 50% of his screen-time and there are so many scars he has never seen before he doesn’t even bother to count them. A little shark is curled up in the hollow between his heel and his shin- a tattoo. A real, actual tattoo. Thank the gods it’s something he likes.  
Percy runs a finger through his hair (shaggier and thicker) “Ok. I must have been cursed or something. I’ve bent sent forward in time to occupy the older me’s body. Yeah that’s it. Kronos cursed me and now I’m older Percy.”  
The naiad squints “Does the name Jason Grace mean anything to you?”  
A bolt of pain rips through the back of his neck. Percy swats at it, wondering if there are mosquitos around, or if anything could survive this kind of environment “I know Thalia Grace.”  
She pooches out her bottom lip, creating the effect of a bottom-feeding fish “How about Frank Zhang, or Hazel Levesque?”  
“No.”  
“Annabeth Chase?”  
Percy’s heart skips a beat, as it always does at the thought of his new girlfriend “Yeah. Of course I know Annabeth.”  
“Riddle me this. Do you know either Leo Valdez or Nico di Angelo?”  
“I know Nico. He’s sorta, a, a friend I guess. Who’s Leo?”  
“What about Piper McLean? Reyna Avila Ramirez-Arellano?”  
The sting has grown to a pounding headache “Are you making these people up? Can you check my neck? I think there’s a leech on me or something.”  
He turns around and she reports his neck is clean, of leeches at least.  
“How old are you Percy?”  
“I just turned sixteen.” although, looking at his body, he doesn’t quite believe himself “What do you know that I don’t?”  
“You had a bag when I found you.” she gestures to a bag further up the bank where an unfamiliar back-pack sits. “Go root through that. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”  
Percy scoops up the bag “I can’t stay here, can I? Not near that.”  
The naiad’s face falls “No I suppose you can’t. I don’t get much company out here…company that isn’t bloating and leaving a trail of disintegrated flesh.”  
Bile rises in Percy’s throat “I’ll be going then.”  
She waves “Thanks again for not dumping cow-shit in me. I mean, not that it means much now, but I really appreciated it.”  
Percy scales the hill and disappears over the crest quickly, still staring at the mysterious prosthetics attached to his right hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, the big man himself. Almost. Percy's missing a few bits and pieces


	15. Hope, English and a fuck-ton of zombies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's Nico again. I'm still uncertain about the structure I'm going to use, but I'll probably do one chapter for each narrative for a while, with the little flashbacks scattered in them for a while. I don't know. Most of the story is plotted out, but the delivery is going to be a little bit weird for a while, so please bear with.

Where the fuck are they all coming from?  
Has every corpse in Britain decided to get up and join the party? Nico’s arms are like lead from swinging his sword repeatedly and the stress of using his magic has already started to take its toll. His head pounds and his vision dances. Every now and then he snaps his fingers and causes a couple of the zombies to collapse, back to the dust and rotted flesh they are. But the swarm is so incredibly dense destroying a dozen or two dozen at a time barely makes a difference.  
The undead are difficult to fight, simply because they are empty on the inside unlike mortal or immortal opponents who tend to have fears Nico can easily sense and exploit. Most are afraid of him, in fact. But zombies? All they want to do is stuff their rotting maws and they’re not even conscious of it.  
He made a mistake. The moment he saw the first zombie, he should have run in the opposite direction. He cut down one, then another and a few more and before he knew it the whole army was upon him. He has managed to carve out a circle eight feet wide with his sword by constantly attacking, attacking, attacking, but he knows he can’t keep this up much longer. Already, he has tried shadow-travelling and found he can’t. One of his worst nightmares has finally been realised- being hemmed in by a seemingly unstoppable force with no escape. He hasn’t had the time to panic yet, or even be afraid.  
His mind is stuck on the most mundane of thoughts. Nico has a History paper to do, waiting for him on his desk in his cabin. Yesterday was a normal day. High-school in New York, glowering at everyone who approached (having one group of people following him around like ducklings at home is quite enough, thank you), talking to Hazel over the phone (a piece of technology that makes them both profoundly uncomfortable despite its conveniences), messing around with Jason and then later with Leo in a really different way he would never ever consider doing with Jason, then the standard two hours of sleep…right? So how the hell did he end up here?  
Apart from Hades’ obvious involvement, he hasn’t thought of a single reason he could be out here. He needs to think.  
Swatting the head off another zombie, Nico surveys the horizon and finds it still packed into the rainy distance. This is so bad. Why does the weirdest, baddest shit always happen to him, or when he’s around? Why does he have to be the magnet for the undead? Why can’t the blood-sucking ghosts and the spiritual imprints of psychotics go after somebody else? What the hell is so attractive about an Italian who’s never weighed more than 110lbs in his life when there’s a veritable of multicultural dishes on the menu too?  
A putrid mouth nearly clamps down on his shoulder. He brings up his knee and caves the face in “Why does everything make a special effort to eat me?” he mutters “I’m barely an appetiser. More like the toothpick.”  
He half expects to hear a snarky reply of agreement from Leo then he remembers he’s on his own in this battle. It’s kind of disconcerting. He can’t remember if he’s fought a single battle alone since the War on Gaia. Of course the first battle he fights by himself would have to be the one against the ravenous zombie horde, wouldn’t it?  
Swearing, Nico re-doubles his efforts and manages to carve a path to the Barrow where he left his bag. He shoots up the steep slope at the speed of light and turns, ready to defend himself. Half a dozen of the dead try to follow him up. Their feet scuffle uselessly, a couple of ankles snap and they all fall over each and slide back down, leaving a small trail of brown blood in the wet dirt.  
Nico glances all around the Barrow and sees the rest at the edge of the crowd pressing around him struggling similarly. He drops his sword and sits heavily on the top of the Barrow.  
“Why didn’t I think of this before?” he hisses, knocking his head on his knees “Fuck am I glad no one else saw that. That was stupid to the extreme. Oh my gods, I’m losing my shit. I’m going to go insane. I’m going to start idolising fictional psychopaths and start collecting dolls and everyone’s going to think the doll thing is just my inner Lavender-Larry finally breaking out until I snap and rampage through the camp and slit someone’s throat with a sharpened shoe horn.”  
He takes a quick moment to calm down. Then he carefully considers his options.  
1) Go back to slicing and chopping and see where that gets him.  
2) Stay where he is and wait for rescue from whoever left him here (little help, Dad, you cold condescending bastard?)  
3) Catch up on some sleep, even though the rain is tipping down and there are zombies after his flesh  
4) Do that one thing his friends made him swear he would never do unless he had some reliable back up ready to catch him and carry him away from the battlefield.

He may not be able to access the highways he uses to shadow-travel, but Nico can still feeling his magic simmering inside him. For some reason, he isn’t at full power. If he was he’d have a pounding headache and a pain in his side Hazel won’t stop comparing to menstruation. Nico and Hazel’s powers are not meant to exist inside anything that is actively alive, much less a living mortal, but due to their father’s blood the conditions inside their body are different in such a way that accommodates magic meant for the dead. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to use though, which is why they both prefer relying on swordsman-ship or separate, jewellery-related curses to defend themselves.  
If he wanted to, Nico could raze this entire field with a single gesture. Doing so would knock him out for a minimum of two hours or a maximum of twelve. Even if he gets back inside the Barrow, there is no way to guarantee his safety in this hostile environment. He can’t afford to make himself vulnerable to anything, so that thing everyone hates it totally out of the question.  
“Damn.”  
Nico stands up and starts to pace. He’s found that in times of difficulty, talking to himself is a great way to work through it, kind of like writing it all down. That is, provided no one is around to see him.  
“I could just tear through you ugly motherfuckers, couldn’t I?” he peers at their vacant faces “You guys are kind of like a herd of…Republicans or something. Strand the sexual minority on top of a pile of dead people then try to flay him. Actually that’s probably just me being paranoid again. I’m sure some of you were charming, open-minded people before you bought it. I tend to expect a dog-pile of white-coated doctors whenever the little pink problem is addressed. I mean, Jesus, I’ve only been in modern times for like a fourth of my life. I still think homosexuality is classed as a mental illness a lot of the time. And now I’m baring my soul to a bunch of zombies. Wow, me. Nice job, me. Maybe next time me and Leo need to talk things out I’ll imagine him as a zombie and we’ll actually get somewhere.”  
Nico is surprised with himself. He’s been on top of the Barrow for a grand total of two and a half minutes and the cabin fever seems to be setting in already. Staying here is not an option. He looks at the ground, pressing his palm to the soil. There is a definite heart-beat, like buried thunder.  
He certainly can’t afford to waste any time with Gaia awake again.  
“Oh fuck it. Let’s do this in small steps.”  
He draws his sword and snaps his fingers, causing a knot of zombies trying to get up to him to collapse.  
“HEY!!”  
He almost jumps out of his skin.  
There, at the very edge of the crowd which is now shuffling slowly around to stare, is a figure mounted on complex machine that looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. A bird is perched on the figure’s helmet with its white wings spread, apparently in an attempt to look menacing.  
“ARE YOU OK?!” the figure hefts a large silver cylinder and props it up on its shoulder, obviously preparing to fire.  
He shrugs in reply. His mind has drawn a blank. He doubts he is going to be able to absorb any more traumatic weirdness today.  
The figure removes its helmet. The distance is too great, the visibility to poor, for Nico to judge if it’s man, woman or monster. He makes sure his sword catches the grey light, although this person doesn’t seem to be hostile. If they were, why would they have warned him by shouting out before they…used whatever that thing is, on their shoulder?  
“YOU MIGHT WANT TO SORTA…GET THE FUCK DOWN AND STUFF! IT’S ABOUT TO GET UGLY OUT HERE!” they sound female.  
Nico can’t quite wrench his eyes from the bird on her head, like the crown of a totem pole. The zombies have started to stumble forward to the woman, who is less than 10ft away from the closest of them. She works quickly, but shows no signs of alarm. The bird sits on her as calmly as if it were perched on a tree branch.  
“Am I in the future?” he asks no one in particular.  
He doesn’t claim to be an expert on modern technology by any means, but that bike-thing and the bazooka-thing are far too sleek and light to belong to any era he has lived in.  
“I think I’m in the future.” he confirms to no one “Yay. A dystopian future. Never heard of something like that before.”  
The woman fires her weapon. A bolt of pure blue energy crackles and shoots out of the mouth of it. She rakes it through the ranks without missing a step. Whatever the energy touches is cut away as if a blowtorch is being swept over snow, leaving nothing but a thick layer of dust in its wake. She starts to walk around the perimeter of the crowd, who sway after her, totally unconcerned about the weapon cutting through them. The beam penetrates to about halfway to the back of the swarm. Feeling obsolete, Nico sits on the ground and starts to make a daisy chain.  
It’s about twenty daisies long when the woman’s weapon cuts out. She swears explosively and slaps the barrel of the gun. By now, the zombies’ numbers have been reduced by half and there’s a gradual twenty foot shamble between her the closest zombies. It takes a minute before Nico starts to get concerned. They are almost at her throat and she doesn’t seem to be any closer to getting the weapon to fire again.  
“Fuck it.” he drops the chain and brushes his jeans off “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts them anyway.”  
He swipes his hand as if shooing away a fly. The effect is instantaneous: the zombies collapse as if they are boneless and Nico’s vision darkens, his head filled with a searing pain. He kneels and waits for the episode to pass, feeling as if a cheese grater is being scraped on the inside of his head.  
“Are you ok?” asks the woman.  
She scales the Barrow, slipping frequently, wearing her bird helmet-decoration all the while. Nico closes his eyes to slits and grips the hilt of his sword to reassure himself.  
“Yeah.” he lies.  
“So…who are you?” she touches his shoulder uncertainly.  
He doesn’t have the energy to pull away, but she reels back as if touching him gave her an electric shock. A standard reaction from people making physical contact with him for the first time. The woman rubs her arm and steps back. The bird on the other hand, it jumps off the helmet and hops towards Nico without fear. That’s definitely not normal.  
Dogs have almost throttled themselves on their leashes trying to get away from Nico before. Animals are terrified of him in general –except for dragons, for some reason, and Hazel’s steed Arion.  
“I don’t think your bird is really a bird.” he mumbles.  
“She is,” insists the woman “Her name is English. Mine is Hope Victor. Have you heard of me? I’m from the Lookout a few miles away. The last one left in this district.”  
‘District’, he thinks, fucking hell, I wandered into the Hunger Games and I hate the series.  
“What’s yours?” presses the woman.  
Automatically, Nico resorts to using his alias “Karkat Vantas.”  
Well, not his alias per se, but the fake name he’s supposed to introduce himself with when he’s been separated from the others. Jason insisted on picking the names and for some reason none of them stopped him.  
“Karkat?” repeats Hope “What a weird name. Are you a boy or a girl?”  
Nico pauses. Since puberty, his voice has plummeted in depth. He’s not sure how a girl could produce the kind of deep voice he has, but whatever. “What year is it?”  
Hope laughs nervously “Disorientated?”  
“What year is it?”  
“2077.” says Hope, as if it should have been obvious.  
Nico’s not sure what to feel. Should the breath be caught in his lungs, his heart pounding? He was kind of expecting something like this. It doesn’t make sense at all, but it really doesn’t surprise him.  
What’s keeping him calm are the seven little lights inside his chest. Whatever the hell is going on, Leo, Hazel, Jason, Reyna, Percy, Annabeth, Frank and Piper are all alive and well for the moment.  
That’s a good place to start.  
He stands up shakily, and the bird immediately hops onto his shoulder. Nico takes a good, hard look at the talons English is using to grip his jacket and decides not to antagonise the bird if he can help it.  
“She’s a kite.” says Hope “Me, I’m a lowly Fiver, like you.”  
Nico doesn’t know what a Fiver is, but he should probably claim whatever kinship she is offering to give him some leverage “Yeah.”  
Hope examines him more closely “You’re a Gee-gee right?”  
“…what?”  
“A refugee. From where?”  
“Tibet.” He says, also automatically.  
In Tibet, he actually has some sort-of family there to vouch for him. Back when he was just learning to shadow-travel he made an awful lot of accidental trips to what he thought was China, but what proved to be Tibet. On one of his more inaccurate tries he ended up materialising in the centre of a meditation circle of monks. After they were all finished screaming, he managed to explain an abridged version of who he was and what he was doing to some of the monks who spoke English, who then relayed it to the rest of the monastery who agreed to let him pass the night there. They became a kind of adopted family after that. Since the war ended, apparently sixty two years ago, he has visited his monks as frequently as twice a month. He even took Hazel along on a few trips.  
Someone from the monastery has to be alive. There were tiny children who will be in their seventies and eighties now, who should remember him.  
Gods, he hopes they’re ok. Tibet is constantly getting the shit kicked out of it, so who knows what could have happened to it in the sixty years Nico has been gone? For that matter, where did he go? Has he been in the Barrow for sixty years? His head hurts way too much to be struggling through these puzzles.  
Hope seems offended to hear where he is from, however “Tibet? Really? Why the fuck did you leave? That place is a gods-damned fortress!”  
“My father beat me. My mother was a whore. I was being abused. I don’t know, invent a reason. I had to leave.”  
Hope furrows her brow “Listen, I don’t want to keep you out in this fucking rain much longer but I have to know how you did that. You snapped and the zoms just collapsed. How is that possible?”  
If Gaia’s awake, then it’s probably not a good idea to blurt out his godly heritage “Tibetan magic.”  
“Tibetan magic?” she repeats sceptically.  
“Tibetan magic.”  
English squawks in Nico’s ear. Flinching, he casts a sideways glance at the bird, who seems to be on the verge of a freak-out. Suddenly she takes off, digging her claws painfully into him for traction. The kite winds tight circles a few feet over their heads. Her wings graze Hope’s crown.  
“Sorry,” says Hope sheepishly “She’s a bit of a nutter.”  
Nico is about to agree when he is hit by a full-body shiver “No I don’t think she is. Something’s coming.”  
Bristling, Hope jams her helmet back on and shakes the bazooka-thing frantically “How the hell can you tell?”  
“I just can.”  
“You’re a Sixer aren’t you?” she laughs “I knew it. Magician my ass. Who’s your momma? Your daddy?”  
“There it is.” he points out a three-story smudge in the grey, emerging from the fields beyond Stonehenge “Any idea what that is?”  
Hope’s face turns white “Oh. Oh no.”  
Nico registers the dirt-encrusted skin, the dreadlocks braided with snarled roots and the nails made from flints of rock. Hazel’s handiwork.  
“Alcyoneus.”  
Now he knows with a dreadful certainty that he has been gone for a long time. Whatever this little spell is- it’s not a small, eight-month hop like Percy or Jason’s. It has been years. A decade. More than that, maybe, considering how far back in the dust of Tartarus Alcyoneus was thrown when they finally killed him. Even with Gaia’s help, Alcyoneus would take many years to re-form.  
Nico really is in the future.  
He pushes the questions this raises to the side and readies his sword. English lets out a cry and zips higher into the sky, turning loop-the-loops in her anxiety. Hope is still trying to persuade her weapon to work and doesn’t seem to be having any luck. She tosses it to the ground in disgust and draws a seamless L-shaped object from her belt.  
“Do you have a Bronze-bolt?” she must be referring to the gun “An Imperial Thunderer?”  
“Nope.”  
She blanches even whiter “He’s going to kill us.”  
“No he won’t.”  
“Yes he will.”  
Alcyoneus is obviously heading straight for them.  
“He will,” insists Hope “He doesn’t care about Tiers or race or employment. He just kills for sport. There’s no way to hide from him. We’re going to be killed.”  
“No we won’t.” English shrieks overhead. Nico glances up at her “That’s not a bird by the way.”  
“Yes it is. I’ve had her for five years.”  
“How old is she?”  
“I don’t know.”  
Alcyoneus clears Stonehenge in one giant stride, taking care not to crush anything. His eyes are like search beams dozens of feet above the ground, fixed solidly on Hope and Nico. His lips are already twisted into a cruel smile in anticipation of the fun to be had. Hope’s hands are trembling, the weapon with it, but it is plain she doesn’t plan to die without a struggle.  
Nico just wants to go to sleep.  
“How far away is your whatever it was?”  
“My- my Lookout? We could never make it back there in time.”  
“How far away is the Lookout?”  
“It’s ten minutes by bike.” She shakes her head “I’m sorry, we’d never make it.”  
Nico sheaths his sword “Stand back please.”  
Hope obliges.  
Alcyoneus’s speaks and his voice jars every bone in Nico’s body, combined with his footsteps to make a small earth-quake. “Fighting the undead scourge? What a valiant effort.” he grins with teeth the size and shape of headstones.  
Summoning every last scrap of energy left to him, Nico concentrates on Alyconeus’s head and imagines it as a blossom of gold blood. The kite turns pinwheels and Hope is brushing tears off her cheeks. He tunes everything else out. The rain, the woman, the bird, the cold and even the giant. Then he glances inside himself one last time, at the candles of his friends’ life-forces and thinks about seeing them again.  
Alcyoneus’s head erupts. Blood splashes in every direction. Hope and Nico are doused with a liberal coat of oily blood; literally a fortune’s worth of the liquid gold emulating ichor inside Alcyoneus’s veins. A piece of jawbone lands dangerously close to them then crumbles to a pile of soggy clay. Hope looks down at the gore spattering her clothes and turns away to throw up.  
Sighing, Nico flicks blood from his sleeves and watches Alcyoneus’s body fall over backwards. It narrowly misses crushing Stonehenge and he winces at the thought of being responsible for vandalising the sight yet a second time.  
Hope wipes her mouth on the back of her hand “Oh my fuck. Oh my fucking gods. Fucking fucks. Who the fuck are you?”  
English lands lightly on Nico’s shoulder.  
“I’m going to pass out now.” he says calmly “It’s up to you if you want to leave me here.”  
Then he accepts the darkness of unconsciousness gratefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nico just hates the Hunger Games because the first book was good, then the other two fell flat on their faces. He felt betrayed and swore never to touch the YA genre again, burying himself in the classics instead. If it wasn't written before 1970, he isn't interested.


	16. Call him Terezi

“I have about five minutes to explain it all to you, so here it goes. You disappeared, Leo, you and Nico and the rest of them. Clarisse LaRue saw you disappear and she was there when the sky fell in. I mean, it almost fell in, but Lord Zeus caught it from Olympus, the brave fool. He held it while Olympus fell and as far as I know he’s still there. That place over there, look, just past those clouds.”  
“I see it.”  
“That’s where Atlas used to hold the sky, but Artemis was kidnapped early in the war and forced to take his place. I’ve been trying to get her out of there since…gods, since forever. For almost fifty years. Isn’t that insane? Oh, I’m a Hunter by the way, in case you were going to ask. I joined the Hunters when I was twenty-two. Before that I ran with the veterans- sorry, survivors, from the camps. There weren’t many of us, but we managed to get this thing going. It’s called RED, an organisation devoted to winning Round Two. You felt that Gaia was awake, yes?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Well, she woke up and we’ve been trying to find out exactly how she did for a couple of years. There’s this person called Serapis or something or the other. At any rate, he was kind of the meeting point for the Greek and Egyptian mythologies during the brief era where the two of them joined, so he was able to shuttle between the two bloodlines without much trouble. Ah, sorry to spring this on you, but the entirety of the Egyptian mythology is true too. Apollo may be driving the sun, but he shares the lane with this senile old eagle in a boat. Following me so far?”  
“Sorta.”  
“Good. We think Gaia managed to make contact with her Egyptian counterpart, you see. His name is Geb. His wife is the sky, their version of Ouranos named Nut.”  
“Nut?”  
“You have my permission to make as many jokes about her name as soon as I’m done talking.”  
“Yes ma’am.”  
“So, we think Serapis did something that enabled Gaia to contact and bind herself to Geb. When Gaia woke up, she didn’t do it gradually. She woke right the fuck up and had us on our knees before we even knew what was going on. You, Leo, you checked out right before she woke up. Roughly ten minutes before, in fact. I don’t know where you’ve been, but you have some serious explaining to do-”  
“I’m not sure-”  
“Let me finish please, time is of the essence. So Gaia woke up and destroyed the camps first, then the rest of the world in a little under a year. The planet has spent the last sixty years under her control. She put all the old tyrants in charge- Kampé and Enceladus and Kronos- and split the world up into districts-”  
“She ripped off the Hunger Games to enslave humanity?”  
“I know, right? How uncreative, that Dirty Bitch. Anyway, I’ve been working with the hunters on-and-off to try to free Artemis and travelling the world to help out RED as a sort of ambassador in my spare time…I was looking for you too. I went all over the world. I went to fucking Antarctica and you turn up on my doorstep of all places. To make a long story short, I stopped looking a long time ago, took over from a tyrannical dictator who was running the Hunters and I’ve been under siege from this monster rabble for half a year. Normally, we’d be able to fight them off without too much trouble but this enormous Gee-gee convoy came in last year from Newfoundland and we can’t leave the fortress without leaving them undefended. So we’ve been under siege for six months and I’m about to lose my shit.”  
“Need some help?”  
“Fuck yes, please.”  
Leo’s brain is about to implode. None of what Reyna just said makes the least bit of sense. It’s too overwhelming to believe- his entire world gone? Ridiculous. Ok, he can believe a couple of nations have fallen maybe, or a few cities have been destroyed like the one they are leaving behind them rapidly, but the entire world?  
Russia, Spain, Mexico, Bolivia, South Africa, Canada, Germany and all those other countries? The cities and the landmarks that have stood for hundreds of years, some of them surviving great natural disasters and others outlasting empires? How can those be gone too? Humanity’s grip on the earth is far too tight to be shaken. There’s just no way. Not with the guns, the nukes and everything else the people of the world have been using to kill each other since the Industrial Revolution. People would have banded together, forgotten old grudges and used the strengths of each culture and ethnicity to their advantages. Against all the odds, people would have come out on top, right?  
That’s how it works in the movies.  
Then again, the death scenes are slow and loving with some kind of heart-breaking soundtrack playing softly underneath last minute confessions of love. In Leo’s vast experience, fiction and real life rarely match up. Sometimes there’s no time for last words.  
Sighing, he rests his head on the back of Reyna’s neck and wills the bad thoughts away. He’ll worry about it when he has the energy and the time. Even now, he can hear the roar of a battle in the distance.  
“What do you want me to do?”  
Reyna is silent for a few minutes “I don’t know. I think I want you to fix everything and return to world to normal and turn the clock back sixty years and then maybe propose to Nico while you’re at it.”  
He laughs weakly “I mean about the army, Rey. What do I do about the army?”  
She snorts “Oh, right. Well just torch the buggers, will you? We don’t have the firepower to do it ourselves.”  
Leo’s chest feels heavy, and not only because of the new boobs “Are the Doors of Death open again?”  
“Gaping.”  
“So…just burn them then let them come back?”  
She shakes her head, making him inhale her hair “No, no, we have a method for dealing with monster dust. We soak the dust, which doubles the time it takes to reform then we sweep it all up into big sacks and throw the sacks into the ocean.”  
“Was that a joke?”  
“No. I don’t joke much anymore.”  
“Tell me that was a joke.”  
“No it wasn’t, Leo.”   
There is a certain relish to the way she says his name, as if pouring cold water on a burning wound. Leo guesses it must be all kinds of awesome to find an old friend in the same condition she lost him sixty years ago, but it still doesn’t feel real to him. He saw Reyna last week. They talked about college and watched a movie and complained about how Michael Bay equates the quality of a director with the number of explosions that can be squeezed into a feature-length.   
And suddenly, they are over the battlefield.  
The air is thick with shrapnel being flung from catapults and with swarms of drakons circling a small ‘fortress’, which looks more like a museum with some hastily erected barriers around it to keep out the hostile hordes, which are pretty fucking hostile. They’re clad in the usual misshaped armour with the usual warped weapons- Leo doesn’t know what he was expecting, maybe monsters on high-tech hover bikes or something? Some sign that he is really in the future, not just recovering from a nap that lasted a few days.  
Wait a second. Isn’t Skippy, Reyna’s loyal steed, isn’t he dead? Leo looks down at the Pegasus, then further down at the monsters then at the fortress where tiny figures dressed in silver swarm like panicked ants. Good enough.  
“I’ll get off here.”  
He slides over the side of the horse before Reyna can protest and drops into empty space. 

In the handful of seconds between the instant he slides off Reyna’s horse and the instant his skin boils to fire, if anyone down below notice the sudden appearance of the spear of pure flame in the sky, they don’t say anything. They start to make all kinds of noise once he joins the attack.  
First, he blows through the outermost layer of monsters, those who are farthest from a glowing membrane like rope that forms a dome over the Hunter’s stronghold. Passing through them, they blow apart like leaves. Passing close enough to them, his fire sucks the oxygen out of their lungs and toasts them lightly while he’s at it, leaving their blood simmering. A cry shoots through the ranks. The army turns from the shield like one organism in time to see him systematically burning his way through them.  
There is little time to react and less to fight back.   
Within a moment, the Hunters are lowering their bows and sheathing their swords. Reyna has alighted on the ramparts and assured her soldiers the danger has passed, and that they should get the clean-up crew out there as soon as possible. The air is heavy with smoke and the smell of burnt hair and fur. Armour has melted and fused with a few bodies, making them look like the foetuses of automatons. The fire that ripped through the army, the army that had laid siege to the last pocket of the Hunter resistance for half a year without being challenged, still burns in the ashes. Its faint glow is visible, pulsating behind a shroud of smoke.  
“Welcome back,” Orion grabs Reyna’s hands and squeezes “Is that him?”  
Reyna draws the giant closer and tugs him down by the collar to whisper: “Don’t say his name. Don’t let the others know.”  
Orion is confused, but he and Reyna have been together long enough for him to know she has a good reason for most everything she does. She’ll fill him in later.  
“What do I call him?”  
Reyna’s mouth is drawn into a tight line “Terezi Pyrope, if anyone asks.”  
Orion doesn’t understand why she giggles as she says the name, but he’s more surprised by the fact that Reyna remembers how to laugh.  
Asal asks “Who the fuck is that?”  
Leo is now in his, or her, flesh form, shaking ash out of his blonde hair and wiping it out of both (organic) eyes and tripping over a piece of bubbling helmet.   
Reyna hops onto the ramparts, throwing her arm around the column of a bare flagpole. She turns to face the gathered Hunters on the ramparts, a look of radiant triumph on her features “THE SIEGE HAS ENDED!” she needs no frivolous gestures like a punch to the sky or a bark of laughter, her strong voice is just enough “THE HUNTERS ARE VICTORIOUS!”  
The cheer drowns out Asal’s protest: “We didn’t do shit!”  
The cheer is echoed from the inside. The Gee-gees must have heard. Now some of the guards that were posted to guard the inner-doors are spilling outside and dancing around on the various corpses scattered. One of them rushes up to Leo and shakes his hand vigorously and slaps him on the back. Unfortunately Leo isn’t that steady on his legs yet, especially after the firestorm he just whipped up, and the force of the congratulation knocks him onto his knees, but he laughs and hauls himself up on the Hunter’s arm.  
Britomartis’s eyes glow with joy underneath her net “She looks like Artemis.”  
“No she doesn’t. Don’t be ridiculous.” snaps Asal “Look at the ass on her.”  
Orion tugs Reyna’s sleeve “What are you planning?”  
Reyna smiles a sile which he cannot see, which is good for him, because he would be very alarmed by the look on her face. “A revolution.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapter. The Australian heat is not good for my brain.


	17. Concerning the new world order and an old ....'friend'

It’s a pleasant surprise for Yuri when he wakes up the next day with his throat uncut. The Annabeth he carried home on his back and the Annabeth pictured in the Manifesto may look totally different, but he couldn’t quite shake the suspicions against her thoroughly enough to convince himself it was safe to leave his bedroom door unlocked. He also pushed the dresser in front of the door and slept with a larger knife than the usual under his pillow. Still, a part of him fully expected to wake up with his throat between Annabeth Chases’ teeth.  
Pulling on a baggy sweater over his pyjamas, Yuri stuffs a knife into his sleeve and tip-toes downstairs. Annabeth is basically where he left her, except she has now wrapped herself entirely in a cocoon of blankets so only her pale face is showing. A hand shoots out of the depths of the bedding to turn a page every now and then. Yuri swallows hard, leaning against the door-frame.  
She may not look like the girl in the picture, but she certainly is giving off a certain psychotic vibe.  
“You’re awake.” she says without looking at him “Good. I have some questions.”  
“Me too. Lots of them, actually. You can go first.”  
She gestures for him to sit beside her. It doesn’t seem wise to him to refuse her invitation to sit on his own damn floor, so he goes ahead and does it, retracting a hand into sleeve to grip his knife.  
“First question. Where am I?”  
Yuri racks his brains “I think we used to be called Russia. We’re Kampé’s district now.”  
Her eyes flash “Kampé? That bitch? Ha, well, she and I go way back. She’s not as tough as they have you believe.”  
“I know.” he read the books.  
A friend of his- whom he is not allowed to claim as a friend under any circumstances and who has disappeared anyway- she leant him the full set. He blasted through each book in the first series in one day, then two days for each in the second owing to their thickness. Yuri’s mind has switched into over-drive trying to retrieve the facts about Annabeth he read, something, anything to give him an idea of how to deal with her.  
“How do you know?”  
He swallows again “Um…I just do. I’ll tell you why later, but I don’t want to overwhelm you.”  
She gives him a look almost as cold as the snow outside “I exploded out of a frozen pond I may have spent sixty years inside, then I was carried through a magical winter wonderland to a medieval Baltic village, then I spent the entire night reading a 600-page book of propaganda telling me why everyone and everything I love is a crime against nature and why my shared nemesis is the most wonderful, loving entity in creation.” she lunges forward so quickly their noses bump “Nothing will surprise me.”  
He scoots back “There are books. Ten books about you and your friends.”  
She narrows her eyes “All of them?”  
“Everyone in the Manifesto and a couple more. Grover and Reyna and Thalia and Rachel. The Roman and Greek camps too.”  
“Do you have any of them?”  
Disturbed by the hungry look in her eyes, Yuri scoots all the way back and bumps into a chair “No. I can get them for you later, if you want.”  
“I’m assuming these books are about our quests…starting when we were eleven, right?”  
He nods.  
She leans back, apparently satisfied for the moment “Ok. We’re in Kampé’s district, formerly known as maybe Russia. I am a world-renowned outlaw and there is a book series concerning my misadventures…now how did those books get written? From what I’ve read this world is under a dictatorship that spans globally.”  
“Did you read the, uh, the ‘underground factions of resistance’ part?” he tugs at his collar “There’s only one now, actually. They all banded together. They go by the name of RED. The Director, that’s the head of the organisation, they wrote them.”  
“What do you know about the Director?”  
“Think it’s someone you know?”  
Annabeth’s mouth tugs down at the corner just a little bit “Maybe.”  
She flips through the book and holds up a page for him, entitled ‘The Purge of the Camps’.  
Her mouth slips down lower “A lot of exaggeration goes into these kinds of texts. The government will try to massage the figure to make themselves seem impressive. ‘History is written by the winners’ and stuff. Still…it doesn’t sound too optimistic for my side.”  
“There are a lot of Sixers left. Hermes-slash-Mercury, he breeds at a rate like you’ve never seen.”  
She snorts “I have a pretty good idea of how fast that god can bang out some babies.”  
If she were any of the other heroes he could have ended up with, Yuri might have laughed.  
“From what I read, these ‘Sixers’ are the lowest level of society. How come we haven’t been killed off altogether?”  
Yuri shrugs “I guess it would have been too tough to do. If she made a big thing out of hunting down the whole Sixer race, she’d have a huge struggled on her hands and that might shake the system. She’d have to finish what she started or she’d end up with some kind of rebellion on her hands. Trying to wipe out every Sixer there is would have made the ones who survived like, uh, Robert Hoods or something.”  
She cocks an eyebrow “You mean Robin Hood. I’m impressed. You’ve really thought about this.”  
He tugs at his collar and glances towards the window, though the curtains are drawn over them “I had a…friend. She’s gone now, but she knew about stuff like that.”  
“Was she with RED?”  
Yuri stares at her.  
Clearly, the books were not exaggerating Annabeth’s intelligence.   
“From the face you’re pulling I’m gonna guess I’m right. Where did she go? I need to get into contact with these RED people.”  
Annabeth only realises she has stumbled, or rather stampeded, across a sensitive subject when Yuri’s face falls. Awkwardly, she pats him on the arm then withdraws her arm quickly.  
“What happened to her?” she asks, more softly this time.  
“She’s dead, I think. I don’t know what it was like where you were from, but here, when someone disappears then they’re dead. Cyrus never got along with the people in the village. She got along with me because technically I’m not a part of the village (he holds u a hand to stop her asking why). She was kind of my best friend from childhood, even though she was unbelievably old, like twenty five or something and I’m pretty sure everyone thought she was just molesting me.”  
Annabeth’s lip curls “Was she?”  
“No. She did teach me archery and swordsmanship and my basic mythology. My parents hated her. They forbid me from talking to her, but we hunted together a lot. She disappeared last year around the time the siege of the RED headquarters started, so I guess she went to help and got killed.” he shrugs “Happening a lot these days.”   
Annabeth seems uncomfortable by his frankness, but she tries not to show it “Siege?”  
“Siege. You know Khione?”  
A laugh bursts out of Annabeth, coming through her nose so a glob of something shoots out. Cupping a hand over her face, she dashes for the kitchen and wipes her nose on a paper towel. Yuri thinks about asking her to put half of it back, considering how rare paper towels are these days, but she probably doesn’t want to hear that.  
“Khione?” she repeats “Oh yeah I know Khione.”  
Yuri gets the feeling there may be a chapter in the Leo vs Khione situation that the writer saw fit to omit for the younger audience.   
“Why? Why is Khione funny?”  
Annabeth’s turning red in the face “Did they write about her epic smack-down with Leo in the books?”  
He nods.  
“I’ll bet they cut out the part about the two story dick.”  
She breaks down into fresh giggles. Yuri waits until she has regained her control to elaborate “Khione’s responsible for bringing winter to all the countries. She’s got this kind of shaky treaty with the other gods that allows her to move around pretty freely, but she’s not that popular. Lots of the heads of districts say she’s undermining their authority by making it so cold their livestock can’t function.”  
“Livestock?”  
Yuri thumps his chest “Yours truly. Kampé is always happy to have Khione around. There was this huge uprising about five years before I was born and a lot of the authority around here was killed. She punished us by imposing a constant state of winter with Khione’s help. We can only grow crops with permission inside greenhouses and to keep the wildlife healthy, they had to create these forest zones where spring could come. Every now and then they drive some deer and such out of the parks for the hungry masses (thumping his chest again). It’s hard to eat out here, when my parents are gone, but I manage.”  
Annabeth returns to the living room, dropping onto the couch “Where is the headquarters she’s sieging?”  
“Canada. It’s only a secret if you’re not a sympathetic- oh, that means someone allied to the RED cause.”  
“And what’s that?”  
Yuri spreads his arms “A lot of things. Mostly, just toppling Gaia and creating peace.”  
“And what are their methods like?”  
He’s beginning to feel a little attacked “Depends on the mission. They aim to cause as little loss of livestock as possible, whether that’s monster or Fiver or Sixer. They do a lot of assassinations, which is kinda shit since the guys just come back the next week extra-pissed anyway. But sometimes they stop something horrible by killing. Last year, a one-man cell sneaked into the heart of the Twins’ territory and took them down before they could start a purge in a Fiver slum, then evacuated and scattered the slum population across the whole country. They’re good with stuff like that.”  
“Interesting. Are you a part of RED?”  
If Annabeth’s going to be here for more than a day, he’ll have to teach her which questions are not ok to ask and why that was one of the worst “No. Not really. To be a part of RED you have to be able to go on missions or work directly for them, gathering information from the inside and arranging supplies convoys and stuff. I’m in the boondocks of Gaia’s frozen nowhere. I can’t do anything but hunt and shake my fist at the authorities’ backs whenever they pass through.”  
Annabeth scowls “So there’s no outpost or anything?”  
“There is if you count Cyrus’s place, but she destroyed all of the communication equipment and the codes and stuff before she left.”  
“I’m counting Cyrus’s place.” she stands up suddenly and falls over immediately “I know this is kinda rude to ask after what you said about food, but is there breakfast?”  
He points towards the pantry “Sure.”

Yuri doesn’t claim to know much about the world that was before the fall, but they must have eaten the same sort of stuff because Annabeth isn’t at all put off by the raw greens or the venison or even the mushrooms he puts on the table. She eats all of her portion and then the extra Yuri adds to her plate from his when she’s not looking. He is just starting to think it might be possible to hide her from Nastia and Daniel when there’s a knock at the door.  
They freeze and stare at each other.  
Yuri gestures for her to go upstairs and peeks through the curtains at the knocker. He swears.  
“Who is it?”  
“It’s Kelly. My neighbour.”  
Annabeth’s jaw nearly drops onto the banister “Kelly? Are you sure?”  
Yuri takes in the luxurious furs and the glistening silver jewellery “Pretty damn sure. Hide!”  
Annabeth doesn’t need to be told twice. She jets up the stairs and a moment later there’s the sound of a body smacking into the floor. He suspects she may have thrown herself under his bed. He pastes on a tired, irritated expression and opens the door, bracing himself for the hell that is coming.  
“Yuri!” Kelly thrusts a basket of bread into his stomach, knocking him out of her way “How are you today Mr Rashid?”  
“Fine.” he gasps.  
Kelly shrugs the snow off her fur coat and tosses it over Yuri like he’s a hat-stand “That’s great, good, I’m so glad, and I’m so glad I caught you before you disappeared into that wretched forest. I wanted to see how that child is doing.”  
“Child. The child I brought from the forest?”  
Kelly lifts up the edge of the coat to give him a sceptical look “Yeah. Why, is there another one?”  
“No, no! It’s just that, uh, the kid is already gone. Turned out to be a mania, you know?”   
He realises with a faint horror the dishes are still on the table.  
Kelly is still facing him, away from the kitchen. He lays her fur very carefully on the couch and hopes she doesn’t question the pile of blankets at the foot of it. What now? He has the excuse to go to the kitchen in his arms; the bread, which Kelly brings over every time she busts in. She bakes the loaves herself, she says. Yuri has never eaten a single crumb. Once, he tossed one out into the garden and watched a crow that had eaten it swell up gradually over the afternoon, unable to move, until it literally exploded and spattered the wall with scorched bird guts.  
Kelly has been actively trying to murder him since his fourteenth birthday.  
This will be her excuse to take her operation from the covert to the overt, if she finds Annabeth lurking upstairs. Yuri breezes into the kitchen and smacks the loaves down, using the basket and briskness of the movement to mask how he snatches up Annabeth’s plate and cutlery. He pushes the window open and flings the stuff out the window, turning just before they fall to smile at Kelly.  
“How did you know about the kid?” his words are punctuated by a painfully loud shatter of ceramics.  
Kelly blinks “Everyone knows, honey. Eight people saw you carry him in. Word’s all over the village, you know.” her smile turns icy “When Yuri Rashid does something odd, it’s worth noting, don’t you think? Especially after what that godless Cyrus turned out to be.” she pats his arm “Oh, but it’s not your fault. She was a twisted pervert, I know, and she did terrible things to you.”  
He fights back the urge to smack her upside the head, mainly because he knows from experience his hand will come back coated in the powder Kelly slathers over her face every morning.   
She continues “So…how is it that eight people saw you taking the kid in, but none of them heard the mania episode? We all know what it sounds like when a mania has crept down from the forest- all that screaming and crying and then the inevitable crunch of bone and tearing of flesh. How is it that your house was silent all night long?”  
It was a bad idea to toss the plates outside. While he has been careful to keep the curtains shut against nosy neighbours, if anyone was looking at his garden just now their view would have been unrestricted.  
He thinks fast “It was a quiet mania. I think it had lost its voice. You heard about that banshee with laryngitis in the village over the mountain? Like that. He just wept when I brought him home. I guessed he was a mania when his face melted off, so I locked my room and put some salt across the doorway and windows. He was gone when I got up.”  
Kelly folds her arms “Such a shame. Just when I thought we might be getting some fresh blood in the village.”  
She grins, baring her fangs. Kelly has made no secret of her desire to consume Yuri’s blood while his heart still beats. However, there are a number of rules she must follow, as dictated by the Green Fist, such as not being able to do anything forward like strangling him. His death must be untraceable and his body hidden. Everyone in the village would know it was her, but they wouldn’t be able to prove it.   
Kelly wrinkles her nose “What’s that smell?”   
Yuri’s heart plunges straight through his stomach to his feet “Freshly baked bread?”  
“Smells like Sixer.” she puts her embroidered sleeve over her nose “Are you sure he was a mania and not some Sixer kid mooching a free meal and sleep off you?”  
Thank the gods of the Mountain that Kelly has never been the smartest monster in the village.   
Yuri nods frantically “It’s pretty windy today. Must be the scent from the Sixer district.”  
Even in the smallest, most rural villages like theirs, Sixers are kept separate from the rest of the population in a slum. The ‘slum’ here is less of a slum, more of a shanty-town, and people out here tend to be too busy to bother with prejudice. Still, even the Fiver parents have banned their kids from going near the Sixer section of town.  
“Well, I must be going.” Kelly lunges forward and snatches his wrist, squeezing painfully “Enjoy the bread.”  
He smiles sweetly “Drop dead.”  
Kelly sticks her middle finger in his face and flounces out the door, swinging her fur behind her. Gods he hates her so much. The only reason he hasn’t snapped and killed her is because she would be back the next week with an excuse to kill him, if the village hadn’t already lynched him out fear of what it would mean for them, harbouring a Fiver that had killed higher Tier.  
Sighing, Yuri stretches and traipses up the stairs. On the plus side Kelly will have spread his lie all over the village by the afternoon. That should deter the other neighbours from poking their noses in. Kelly is the only one in the village who would dare to actually come into his house. The rest of them are terrified of him, for some reason, which suits him fine.  
He raps on the frame of the bed “You’re safe.”  
Annabeth rolls out from under the bed, pale as a ghost “Kelly as in K-E-L-L-I?”  
“No. With a ‘Y’”  
She shakes her head “That sounded like the Kelli I know. I’ll bet she tried to change her name. How do you know her?”  
“She’s trying to seduce me and drink my blood.”   
Annabeth snorts, but mercifully, nothing comes out this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so bad at writing Annabeth  
> She comes out like a know-it-all bitch without the others around to keep her laughing


	18. Humberstone and Santa Laura

Hazel begins her sentence in New Rome: “Fun fact, Melione is technically my half-sister-” and finishes it in the Underworld “-in Greek Mythology she’s the daughter of Persephone and Hades.”  
She barely registers that she has been seized by the wrist, tossed through a shadow and is now falling to her knees in the dry grass of the fields of Asphodel until the grass crunches underneath her and the cold and the smell of sulphur hit her like a wave.  
Her father is already wresting her to her feet “We have no time.”  
They are smack-dab in the middle of a crowd of wraiths that stretches like a grey, whispering sea in every direction, interrupted only by a large outcropping of rock which Pluto is steering her towards. The ghosts melt away in front of him.  
Hazel blinks. “What’s going on?”  
“Gaia is awake.”  
Just like that. No bedside manner whatsoever.  
His claim is so absurd Hazel can’t help but laugh “Uh, no she’s not. She’s asleep again, remember? Leo Valdez blew her up.”  
“You’re damn straight I did!”  
Hazel looks up and sees Leo standing on the rock near a row of what look like black coffins. Pluto must have dragged him backwards right out of the Bunker, because he still has his satchel and belt on and he is beyond pissed off. A little scared too, which is bad.  
Pluto pushes her up the rocky out-cropping, not worrying about being rough. She stumbles and Leo has to catch her.  
“She really is awake.” he mutters, helping her get her balance back “I can hear her. It’s just a whisper right now…but she’ll be a regular roar in no time.” he gestures to the row of coffins “I don’t know what your dad is planning to do, but he has all of us.”  
Inside each of the coffins, save the two obviously meant for her and Leo, lies one of her friends, her brother and her boyfriend. They are all asleep, or something like it. There is a bag in all of them, packed to bursting. Pluto hurriedly stuffs a small sliver of what looks like bones into every coffin. Nico stirs just the tiniest bit when Pluto slips what could be a rib into the sleeve of his jacket, his face growing troubled.  
Hazel goes over to Frank’s coffin, which is noticeably larger than the rest of them to accommodate his size, and snaps her fingers under his nose. He doesn’t so much as twitch. Frank is neither a heavy sleeper nor a light sleeper, but he usually wakes up if he’s harassed.  
“What did you do?” she demands.  
“They’re asleep,” Pluto tucks the last scrap of bone into Jason’s pocket “They will be asleep for the foreseeable future.”  
“What the fuck did you do?” she catches him by the arm and forces him to look her in the eye.  
Pluto’s eyes are cavernously black, deep and filled with the suffering his dead subjects bring with them and Hazel can’t help but be made dizzy. “What makes you think this is a good idea? Take me back to Camp Jupiter, right now! I have to warn them if she really is awake!”  
He shakes his head “She is not as she was before. I don’t know how, but she has returned at full strength this time, without preamble.”  
“It’s true.”  
Hazel turns on Leo “How would you know?”  
He shrugs “Search me. She did make a special effort to torture me, didn’t she? I guess I’m still her favourite. She’s telling me stuff right now. There’s another god with her, and he can’t do a thing to stop her. He doesn’t even want to stop her, I think.” his eyes grow dark “Just hear your dad out, ok?”  
Leo already seems to be saying his goodbyes, she notices. He brushes some hair out of Piper’s eyes and wipes a strand of drool off Percy’s chin and takes off Jason’s glasses, clipping them by an arm to the front of Jason’s shirt.  
A rumble echoes across the Underworld before Hazel can form a retort. The ceiling shakes and dust rains down. A soft, surprised cry goes up from the spirits all around – easily the most passionate reaction to anything she has ever seen is Asphodel. A murmur runs through the crowd, a shiver of fear. Pluto closes his eyes and draws a deep breath.  
“Hazel, please glamour them.”  
She sputters “You want me to-”  
“Just do it.” advises Leo “Let him do what he needs to do,” then something horrible occurs to him “Where’s Reyna?”  
Pluto’s jaw twitches “Reyna is an accessory. I’ll barely have the strength to keep the eight of you intact after the battle is lost, and believe me this time we are going to lose spectacularly. I can’t support nine. I don’t need to support nine. Reyna is neither one of the original Seven nor my child, and therefore she is no more significant to me than any of the rest of the rabble from your camps.”  
Leo doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t seem to know what to say. Instead, he puts his head in his hands and sinks to the floor beside Nico’s coffin, utterly defeated.  
“Glamour them.” repeats Pluto.  
Hazel bites her lip “Nico first.”  
She works quickly. She can’t help but tease Nico just the littlest bit, despite the severity of their situation and the increasing ferocity of the explosions over their heads. He’s going to be mad when he wakes up and sees what she’s done to him. Next is Frank, although she has a feeling the glamour won’t last long on him. He already has kingdoms of animals and insect stored inside him, and the glamour will wear out after his first couple shape changes. Next is Piper, who may or may not enjoy her new appearance, then Jason, who ends up with a generic sort of glamour because she couldn’t think of anything else to put on him.  
She’s just finishing up on Jason when she notices Pluto leaning over Leo. He says something into his ear and Leo just sort of goes limp, knocked out. Pluto hefts him into an empty coffin and produces a bag from the folds of his cloak, which he places beside him.  
Hazel spins a quick glamour for Leo. Again, she can’t help but tease him a little bit. He mentioned once how he’d like to see how the other gender lives, as a passing joke. She gave him the chance. She hopes it’s not her goodbye, seeing as Pluto didn’t give her the chance to say one before he knocked him out.  
“Why was he still awake?” she asks while she encases his arms inside white flesh.  
“He was one of the last ones I took. There wasn’t the time to put him to sleep before I came to get you.”  
Tears are pricking her eyes “Will you defend the camps? Will you fight with them, or will you let the insignificant rabble fight your battles as usual?”  
He shrugs “I assume Olympus will conduct its final stand very shortly. I have a whole other kingdom to defend.”  
His form blurs for a moment, and Hazel sees a slightly shorter, darker and altogether creepier man standing his place. So she has not only the pleasure of Pluto’s company, but Hades’ too. Right now, she hates them both more than she has ever hated anyone, even Gaia.  
He catches the look on her face, and once again he lets her scorn pass over him like water off a duck’s back “As I said, you and Nico are the only mortals I have a personal interest in protecting. The rest, the Seven, they are necessary. Years from now you may have the chance to win the world back, but if not than at least you can find each other and…I don’t know, start a commune or something of that ilk.”  
Suddenly, a blinding light fills her vision. Hazel throws her arm up, hissing in spite of herself. A spotlight has fallen through a hole in the stone ceiling miles above and the ghosts it touches are crumbling.  
“That’s it.”  
“I haven’t done Annabeth or Percy!” she snaps “Or myself!”  
“That’s it.”  
Then he touched her forehead and her legs turned to paper underneath her.  
Her last impression of the world is a single, lonely tear making its way down her father’s cheekbone as he bends to scoop her off the floor.  
Then she knows nothing more.

And now she’s here.  
Getting here, to the base of these ‘Faithful’ people, was no easy feat.  
Her limbs are heavy and uncoordinated from the time they spent unused in that coffin. Gods, she shudders to think of how much time could have passed in that prison. Two? Five? Ten? All of her friends will be years older than her if they’re not already dead, casualties of whatever Gaia has done. For a couple of scary moments, Hazel wondered if the ruins they cajoled her through might have been the remains of some major city, buried in sand by Gaia’s powers. Then she recognised a building she remembered seeing on TV before- an old schoolhouse a paranormal team claimed was haunted while they investigated it. Percy liked to watch this show on Syfy, ‘Destination Facts’ or something, and he’d get Nico or Hazel to come and watch an episode with him sometime so they could tell him if the team had caught the shadows of real ghosts, or if it was all being acted out. One episode was based in two abandoned mining towns in Chile, called Santa Laura and Humberstone.  
That was the only episode of the show where they did catch something genuine on camera, although they didn’t seem to realise they had ghost footage. Percy nearly wet himself laughing when they told him there was a dishevelled group of miners, all of them horribly disfigured by violent deaths, dancing behind a woman as she conducted a séance and pulling ridiculous faces.  
She should have recognised the sprawl of the open graves from the start, but she’s willing to forgive herself considering what was happening at the time.  
As they left the graveyard and approached the town, people materialised out of the rows of crumbling houses. The first thing Hazel noticed was the way they were dressed- all of them were dressed in a conservative way, and draped in symbols from various religions. Some of the women wore headscarves, some of them men caps and others turbans, many men wore beards and everyone there was wearing some kind of religions symbol of some kind. Crosses, traditional swords, karas, Stars of David strung on necklaces and robes like the monks she met in Tibet wore. Many of them crossed themselves or made some kind of similar protective gesture when they saw her, but none of them said a word. Hazel would have much preferred that they screamed and shouted and threw rocks at her- their eyes, bright and completely empty, they fell on her and crawled over her skin like she had stepped in an ant hill. There would have been no way to tell them from the ghosts that also watched her except that the ghosts talked.  
The sheer amount of ghosts was staggering. Children, adults, teenagers, the elderly, equal in numbers of gender. Many of them were cut all over with what looked like lashes from a whip and limp on twisted limbs and peered at her out of swollen eyes. But all of them seem good-natured and friendly, from what she heard, and a few were even smiling sympathetically. Her Spanish is far from fluent, and their dialect is very different to the scraps of language she has picked up from Leo and Reyna, but she caught a couple of phrases.  
“Am I (she couldn’t understand it) or can she actually see us? Look, she heard that!”  
“Poor thing.”  
“…rough and rude I hope they don’t hurt her too badly…”  
“…get Charming, somebody, he needs to see this…”  
“I’ll bet you my ghost boots she’ll have escaped by tonight.”  
The last one made her smile and the ghost who had said it, a tall man missing half of his face, clenched his fist, telling her to be strong. Even in her confusion and discomfort, she noticed how strange it was to hear a name like ‘Charming’ from the ghosts of a Chilean mining town that was totally abandoned by the 60s, especially spoken in English.  
The woman hauling her around, Raph, didn’t give her very much time to think about it. She kept the ropes around Hazel’s wrists tight and kneed her in the back every now and then when she thought Hazel was moving too slowly. She said nothing to her strange assembly and didn’t seem able to see the ghosts. She steered Hazel through the town, wrenching her back to her feet when she stumbled and swearing if Hazel squirmed too much. The man without the nose trailed behind her, nodding to some of the crowd who would nod back to him.  
Hazel is counting herself as officially creeped the hell out at this point. By the time they reached the place where she was apparently going to be detained, she was ready to freak out. A building that turned from white to shades of rotten brown and black from exposure loomed over her. The front of it is covered with religious symbols, as diverse as the symbols she saw earlier. They are arranged in a circle, reminding her of the Knight of the Roundtable for some reason.  
The comparison is probably pretty accurate.  
‘The Faithful’. They know her by her appearance and name. Obviously, the Olympian gods are no longer a secret. Obviously, these people are some kind of anti-Olympian, multi-faith movement.  
Obviously, she’s in deep trouble.

Hazel has had most of the night to think about this.  
When they shoved her into their makeshift temple type thing, she was put into a dark room fortified with steel bars on every wall, a precaution she didn’t expect. Judging from the state of the floorboards, Hazel could probably break out of this room by nudging the wall with her foot if it weren’t for the bars. She knows she should have summoned the last little bits of strength left to her when she was still outside and made a break for it. Many of the Faithful carried what looked like handguns and semi-automatics, sort of like props from sci-fi movies? Sleek and evil-looking. Hazel didn’t know what they were, but she bet her life that they would fire some kind of laser at her back the moment she jerked away from Raph and took off, which is why she ended up in this room.  
Raph must be a code name, probably for Raphael which is an angel from the Christian mythos if Hazel’s memory hasn’t failed her.  
In the era she was born, everyone was a church-goer, even she and her mother attended a church. It was one of those ‘black churches’ with a choir to accompany the sermons. People would stay late into the afternoon and bring their lunches with them, so there was a picnic at the end of the service. Hazel and her mother always sat at the back. She used to be anxious to join in with the fun, the singing and the good-natured praise, but her mother would pinch her arm until she was silent and stare forward resolutely, not looking at the preacher but at a space over his head.  
When Hazel became aware of her heritage she understood why she wasn’t allowed to join in. sometimes she worried the preacher would smell the death on her, the foreign god, and set the congregation on her, a child of sin. She understood they only went for the sake of appearances because tongues would wag if they didn’t, and it was already bad enough that Marie was a single mother (they had been saying her father died in a farming accident since the day she was born, but that didn’t stop folks from noticing the ‘white’ in her skin), so to not show up at a church of some kind would have been social suicide.  
Long story short, Hazel doesn’t have many warm memories about her time in church to speak of, and now it looks like not only Christianity is going to bare its teeth at her, but just about every other mainstream religion practiced and a couple of fringe ones she couldn’t identify.  
To top it all off, Hazel’s muscles ache deeply. That burst of activity in the graveyard really wasn’t a good idea. She has no idea how long she has been gone, but from the way Pluto was acting she expects it has been more years than she is comfortable losing.


	19. Zombies and a zip-line

“Where have you come from?” demands the female guard.  
Frank crosses his eyes staring at the arrow she has pointed in his face “The mountain.”  
The male guard gasps and whispers something to the female, but she kicks him in the shins and gives him a withering glare “Shut up Thabo! No he’s not a god!”  
“I’m not,” confirms Frank “I’m just a demigod.”  
They both shush him furiously, showering him with spittle.  
“Don’t say that!” says Thabo, looking around wildly “You say Sixer, not …not that!”  
“A Sixer?” repeats Frank weakly “Ok, I’m a Sixer. Could you maybe not point that arrow in my face?”  
“It’s not for you!” snaps the woman.  
She hefts the bow upright and sweeps it around the horizon, searching for a target.  
The man, Thabo, offers him a hand up tentatively. He seems encouraged when Frank accepts it and stands without changing into a snake or whatever it was he expected.  
“When I said ‘the mountain’ I didn’t mean…” it’s probably not a good idea to invoke the name, considering the way they reacted to the word ‘demigod “I didn’t mean the mountain. I meant…I think, Kilimanjaro?”  
Thabo frowns and straightens his helmet, which has begun to slip over his eyes “Kilimanjaro is miles away.”  
Frank clears his throat “Yeah…distance isn’t a super issue for me.”  
Suddenly embarrassed, the guard nods “Oh yeah, the wings.”  
Something strange occurs to Frank “Are we- are we speaking Ancient Greek?”  
“You were expecting English?” asks the female guard “Obviously you’re a little behind the times, Mr Zhang.”  
This is not good. Frank’s not sure what ‘this’ is, but somehow these people know him by appearance and they know about Olympus. The two of them are not ordinary looking by any means- they’re dressed in identical uniforms that scream MILITARY, with dust-coloured pants (trousers? Depends on the part of the world, he guesses) and brown combat boots, and thin jackets bulging over Kevlar vests just visible near their collars. Both wear helmets that shine like the hide of a black beetle, despite an attempt to colour them brown with what must be mud that is slowly flaking off. Armed with bows and a rifle, they kind of look like a pair of soldiers operating post-apocalypse.  
Frank really, really, really fucking hopes that isn’t the case. Still, the zombies and dinosaurs are kinda hard to ignore.  
These two don’t seem like the kind of people who should know about Olympus, at any rate.  
“Yeah. I am,” he brushes the dust off his jeans and shrugs his backpack off, glad to be free of the weight “Where am I? I mean, Africa, I guess, but my geography’s not too good and Africa’s really big.”  
The woman snorts. Having finished her sweep, she lowers the bow and wipes sweat off her brow. She must be in her early twenties, but she looks a great deal older in the bright sunlight “You’re in Tombstone city. I wish I could tell you what its name was, but no one can remember. Not even the oldest of us.”  
“What year is it?” he blurts.  
The woman looks at him strangely “Where have you been? Why did you disappear?”  
Frank shakes his head, panic rising in him “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”  
Irritated, she presses “I’m asking you where you were when the world ended.”  
He looks over her shoulder at the sheer walls, made of something he can’t identify, some of it encased in scaffolding further up the walls. The crowd shedding ragged clothes and even more ragged limbs, pounding their peeling fists at the base of the wall. The smell of blood and rotting meat covering him like a blanket. The low, faint rasp of a creature that shouldn’t exist, calling the rest of its dazed pack to it. Maybe saying: ‘Walk it off. It was an elephant, what did we think was gonna happen?’  
He laughs, feeling helpless “The world certainly did end, didn’t it.”  
“Where were you?” she demands.  
“I don’t know. Asleep in a coffin, I think. I just woke up like three hours ago.”  
“It’s 2077.” offers Thabo “Sixty years since you disappeared.” he adds, in case Frank can’t work that out for himself.  
He absorbs this information like he’s hearing the weather forecast “Really? Shit. That’s a long time. Lemme guess, the rest of the seven are gone too? And we disappeared just before this…uh…whatever did this, and I’m gonna guess it was the DB, attacked?”  
The guards exchange a glance then nod.  
“How did you know?” asks the woman.  
“Stands to reason. I’m not powerful enough on my own to…to do whatever I was packed away to do.” Frank inspects his hands, expecting them to wrinkle suddenly “Do you guys have movies?”  
“Yeah. We’re not supposed to, but we do.”   
The woman swats Thabo on the arm, presumably for exposing their stash of what must be contraband items.  
“Did you ever see ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?’” he explains when their faces remain confused “There’s this scene towards the end when the main villain drinks from this cup he thought was the Holy Grail, but it wasn’t, so he ages rapidly and starts dissolving into dust and sand and just basically crumbles. I’m thinking…I’m thinking I might start melting into dirt in a minute. I mean, I still look like nineteen-year-old Frank but I’m really…uh…”  
“Seventy-nine year old Frank.” says Thabo.  
“Yeah. I hope don’t start to melt.” he finishes lamely.  
There’s a silence.  
Frank isn’t sure what to do or say. A part of him wants to dive into the throng of zombies and annihilate them with his spears and arrows, to turn into something huge and powerful and crush them to a gritty powder. The other rational part of him wants to turn to the crushing sadness building up inside him like a festering boil. He wants to mourn. He wants to kill.   
And yet, he’s stuck solidly between the two. Unsure if he should add Hazel and the others to his list of people to cry for, he thinks about those who must certainly be dead. Nico and Reyna are dead. Dakota and the rest of his friends at Camp Jupiter are dead too. Camp Half-blood is dead. If gods can die, then his father is probably dead too.  
The strange thing is Frank can’t be bothered to summon up the energy and the emotion to care. It’s too much to deal with all at once. Far too much: the loss of his world, family, friends and even his deadbeat war-mongering dad. Frank knows how to deal with death, or rather, he’s accustomed enough to people being snapped up and out of his life by the Reaper that he has developed a system for coping with it. Initially, he doesn’t allow himself to feel a thing.   
It’s easier not to feel when there are so many things he wants to cry about, so he shuts off all thoughts of the people he’s missing or he’s going to be missing in the near future. It doesn’t work, pretending they never happened, because he’ll catch himself trying to talk to them as if they were next to him or wondering what they would do in whatever situation he faces. But it works just enough to keep him from collapsing.  
It’ll work this time.  
“What are your names? It’s a little weird that you both know my name, but I have no idea who you two are.”  
“Thabo Ivanov.” he shrugs “Not much to say about me. I’m a Fiver, just a guard in the Watchtowers. In my free-time I help out at the neighbourhood clinic.”  
“Kambili Olabode. I’m a Fiver too. I work on the Watchtowers and volunteer at the library. That’s about it.”  
“Ok.” he can work with that “Tell me what you know about me.”  
Another uncomfortable glance.  
Kambili starts “Your name is Frank Zhang. You’re a Sixer from Mars. You can transform into a variety of different animals.”  
So they know the basic background stuff. Frank has to figure out if they know him from wanted posters or if he’s some kind of urban legend with whatever underground rebellion movement is going on. Obviously, there is one, because Gaia is clearly in control of the whole world right now going by the dinosaurs and zombies and the strength of the pulse he can feel humming through the tower from the ground. Also, these guards would have probably shot him in the face straight off the bat if they were loyal to Gaia.  
Frank can’t imagine very many people will be loyal to Gaia.  
“What would happen if I strolled into the city,” he points to the nearby walls “As I am. Would I be tackled and arrested, or killed on sight?”  
“Depends on who sees you. Technically we should have shot you in the face and fed you to the zombies the second we saw you-”  
Thabo interrupts “No, we woulda beheaded him. They need proof that he’s dead.”  
“But you didn’t. So you’re not loyal to Ga- (nope, names have power, Chiron and Annabeth’s favourite line) to the DB.”  
“DB?”   
“Dirty Bitch.”  
They laugh. Already, Frank has failed in his attempts not to think about his friends, who may or may not be dead. Leo came up with that affectionate nickname for Gaia.   
Thabo tries it out “Dirty Bitch. That’s perfect. We’ve been trying to come up with a codename for her that we haven’t taken straight out of the Manifesto, like the Green Fist or Mother. Can I use that?”  
“Sure.” and he tries not to think about how ridiculously smug and happy that would make Leo, to have an underground organisation using his term for Gaia.  
“So what do I do to make sure I’m not shot?”  
“Are you coming to the city with us?” asks Thabo.  
Frank nods “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”  
He does, actually. He could fly to Camp Jupiter or Camp Half-blood pretty easily with the supplies in his bag and investigate what are probably ruins, but he doesn’t see much point in that. The thing to do right now is figure out what has happened and who is fighting it. Apparently, he already disappeared once. The world might not forgive him if he disappeared again.

 

Frank should have mentioned he hates heights.  
Not in the overwhelming way some people are terrified of dizzying drops, but he just dislikes being very high up in an empty space without a pair of wings attached to his back, reassuring him he is in charge of which way he goes.   
He definitely doesn’t want to hop on a zip-wire and spend roughly four minutes zooming towards a sheer brick wall with zombies and a pack of raptors packing underneath him. But here he is, strung up in a harness over a wasteland full of zombies and dinosaurs he has personally pissed off, and he’s expected to take it like it’s not biggie. Thabo goes first. Kambili waits for the harness to come back on some kind of automated pulley system thingie, presumably the same thing that braked and stopped Thabo from splatting on the wall. She buckled him in and pushed him off a platform before Frank could recover his voice to protest, or even quip.  
Zoom. Here he goes.  
Wow. He forgot how much he loathes heights. Actual heights, not the certainty of the splat that awaits him. Frank reflects on his strange fear as he soars through the air over roughly half a mile of zombie-infested desert. He hates the fall the most. The devastating hopelessness of shooting through the air towards the ground, knowing there is nothing he can do to prevent himself from dying. That’s the worst feeling in the world. Of course, there is plenty he can to prevent himself from dying.  
He can be a hawk or an eagle or a bumblebee or one of those traditional Chinese dragons his some of grandmother’s china was patterned with. That form surprised him as much as it surprised his friends, when he turned into a dragon in the middle of a sparring session when he was going for a small housecat. Lucky for him, Jason was pretty cool about being suddenly crushed by a guyfriend who had inexplicably turned into a giant dragon.  
But he’s not thinking about his friends.  
So he doesn’t. Instead, he focuses on the zombies. Trading his human eyes for hawk eyes (which looks as weird as it sounds, as partial transformations tend to), he inspects the crowd. Wishes he hadn’t. Wow they are gross. Like, grosser than he had a concept of zombies being able to be. Grosser than even the best special effects could make them.  
He is staring at zombies.  
Real zombies.   
They’re just so. Offensively. GROSS. JUST BLECH. LOOKING AT THEM MAKES HIM WANT TO SCRUB HIS SKIN RAW AND RED WITH A SPONGE MADE OF STEEL WOOL. OH SWEET GODS OF OLYMPUS AND BEYOND HOW CAN ANYTHING BE SO COMPLETELY, UNAPOLOGETICALLY NASTY?!  
There are limbs hanging off by twists of brittle tissue and eyes swinging by the stem of nerves on cheeks and dried blood absolutely everywhere. He notes uniforms like the guards’ and clothes that are caught somewhere between being futuristic and medieval, and then he’s had about all he can take.  
Frank shuts his eyes.   
It seems like the zip-line is going to last forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haven't seen Frank in a long time. Like, in 13 chapters. Hope he didn't get too lonely.


	20. Foreign gods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapters are getting longer. Not sure if to 'yay' or groan because this means a lot more writing, but hey, I like writing.

Akuna got up and left him after that. Jason watched her limp to the main campfire, ignoring the others as they reeled away from her and stared at the ground she had stepped on as if they expected a rotting hole to appear. He thought for a moment she was going to reveal his identity to the group, and going by her reaction to hearing who he is that would be a very bad thing to do. ‘Murderer’ is far from the worst insult Jason has ever heard, but the way Akuna said it? She relished it. She took her time to taste the word and the corners of her mouth turned up just a little bit. Obviously, she had been waiting for a long time to say that to him or at least to one of these ‘Eight’ she speaks of. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out the ‘Eight’ refers to him, the Seven and either Nico or Reyna or maybe even Rachel. Probably Nico though, since he was on the Argo II: the Sequel with the rest of them.   
Akuna crossed the circle around the campfire and melted into the dark around them. Jason almost got up to follow her. It’s kind of obvious from the way the people around the campfire are behaving that there is something that scares them in the dark all around, and they fully expect it to attack at any minute. None of them tried to stop Akuna. In fact, he caught a hopeful glint in a few of their eyes, as if they were crossing their fingers under their blankets that she wasn’t going to return.  
As for Jason? He’s alone, confused and apparently named Poppy.  
And he suspects there is something very wrong with the earth he is sitting on.  
It’s kind of like sitting on Imagine, the dragon. He could feel her pulse pounding away underneath him, her body swelling slightly as her lungs inflated and deflated. The ground feels the same way; a body coiled underneath him.  
But she can’t be awake, can she? Jason doesn’t claim to have the faintest clue why it worked when Leo blew Gaia’s avatar to kingdom come, but she has been asleep for two or three years. There would have been rumblings, literal rumblings, if she was going to wake up again. During the quest, earthquakes were common, and sometimes one of them would take a step and end up waist-deep in the ground, being sucked under by her powers. Monsters would be re-forming quickly again, on the spot. Olympus has never been talkative, but at least one of the gods would have said something. Hera would have thrown a fit and mind-wiped somebody else, maybe Frank this time, and dropped them into a camp full of Norse or Hindu demigod. There would have been warnings.   
Leo would have known. Gaia whispered to him at the back of his mind for months, if not for the majority of his life. After the war, Leo often speculated he would be the first to know if she ever came back into consciousness considering the history between them. He’d be the first to go.  
Obviously, Jason has had his mind-wiped again.   
He finds a dry twig and starts to draw with it in the dirt while he tries to work out what has happened to him. This time he remembers who he is. He’s Jason Grace, the slightly absent-minded, bespectacled, lightning-throwing ‘jock’ formerly of Camp Jupiter but more recently of Camp Half-blood, although the lines between the two have begun to blur as the camps get closer and closer. His girlfriend is Piper McLean, who would still be the most knock-out gorgeous badass in the world even if she wasn’t a favoured daughter of Aphrodite.   
He doesn’t have a best friend because his friends are all too awesome to pick a favourite from, but they definitely have certain roles in his life. They’re his family. Thalia is family by blood, but she’s on the road most of the time. Kind of how it would be if his sister were a rock-star, except she’s an ageless, arrow-spitting huntress on the road with an immortal goddess that looks like a preteen and a bunch of other strictly female and rabidly sexist hunters.  
Jason is planning to be a teacher when he graduates, for the kids in both camps to ensure they’re not falling behind on their work because of the challenges of the demigod lifestyle like ADHD, dyslexia and the small matter of having monsters constantly trailing them, thirsty for blood. He knows this and everything else about himself he should be expected to know, like his favourite movies and book preferences and the most embarrassing thing he has done in recent memory (snorting Coke up his nose at an event in front of the most senior counsellors from Camp Half-blood and the praetors from New Rome because Reyna whispered something scandalous about Mr D’s love-life)   
In short, Jason’s memory and personality are intact.   
Well, almost. He can’t quite remember the last thing he did in Camp Half-blood, nor can he remember how the blue fuck he got out here in the middle of the gods’ dusty nowhere, or who this little girl calling him a murderer is or how she claims to know him, or what he has done to make the people at the other fire afraid of him, as they so obviously are. Still, knowing himself and his slight control over the weather he must have done something like sneezing and frying one of them with a lightning bolt.  
This is almost as bad as waking up at the Wilderness school. Not that Akuna is in any way, shape or form making a first impression as weird as the one Leo did, but hey, she’s getting pretty close.  
Oh wait. She’s coming back. Jason squints, missing his glasses, and makes out that she is carrying a thick battered book under an arm. She pads over to him and thrusts it to his chest.  
“Educate yourself.” she orders.  
“’Scuse me?” is all he can think to say.  
Her eyes glow in the weaker light of their fire “I knew it was you. I mean, I had no fucking clue it was you as in …JG…but I knew you were one of them.”  
“JG?” repeats Jason.  
“Oh my mountain, you have no idea what I’m talking about!” why does she looks so delighted by this?  
“No I don’t.” he takes the thick book from her and reads the green text on the spine “’The Manifesto- a summary of the triumphs of the Green Fist’.”  
Suddenly he feels like he tumbled headfirst into one of his favourite books “So…are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia?”  
Akuna cocks an eyebrow “Yeah, got no idea what you’re talking about buddy.”  
She opens the book in his hands and flips to a page in the middle. Jason stares at the page and the page stares back at Jason with an approximation of his own eyes. He is looking at a kind of wanted poster with a drawing of him, a list of the monsters he killed and a summary of his abilities. The drawing looks like it was done by someone with a vague idea of how he looked and who was trying to make him look as hideous as possible. To start with, his scar is just a little flick of mottled tissue across his lips, not a ridge that splits his face diagonally. It’s so ridiculous Jason wants to laugh. They made him look like a James Bond villain, like he should be holding the world hostage with a big-ass nuke.  
“I know that’s not what you fucking look like,” Akuna flicks the drawing’s overlarge nose “I read damn the books. I guess you don’t remember the books, but there’s a drawing of you inside them. All of you. Drawings that kinda look like real-ass people, you know? Not these fugly trolls.”  
“Where did you get this from?”  
Akuna points to a faint glow Jason didn’t notice before, nestled between the shadows of two crags of rock “The Foremen. I went over to their fire and said I wanted to brush the fuck up on my history, so one of them gave me a copy. You don’t remember those bastards either, I guess.”  
Jason shakes his head, flipping the page. This time he does laugh “Jesus! Look at Frank! They made him look like a bulldog.”  
Akuna shushes him and swats him on the arm “One, if you’re gonna talk about your buddies use the dam codes, ok? We call them by their initials Two, the old religions are strictly outlawed! Here, look.”   
She shows him a page covered in symbols of many more religions and belief systems than Jason even knew where practiced- everything from atheism to Zoroastrianism- all of them with a green line drawn through them, presumably to illustrate Gaia’s strong opposition to these ‘heathen’ religions for the slower portion of the reading audience.  
He bites his lip “So I could be executed for dropping a J-bomb?”  
“Yeah. You don’t remember, but last week an old dude was caught with a Qur’an and they shot him on the spot.”  
The next page describes the harsh punishments for anyone found worshipping any of the Olympic gods, Roman, Greek or otherwise.  
“Otherwise,” Jason thinks back to an afternoon he spent not so long ago exercising Imagine with Nico “Oh. Damn, he was right. Foreign gods.”  
“You mean the Egyptians?”   
He shrugs “I guess so.”  
“Who was right?” presses Akuna.  
Jason thinks for a second “ND was right. He told me he met someone with an aura that was pretty obviously godly, but he didn’t recognise the god.”  
She scoffs “Well I don’t know how well ND knew his gods but that could have been any-fucking-body. There are more divine motherfuckers roaming around the place than we have the numbers to count.”  
Shuddering, Jason crosses his legs and scoots a little closer to the flames “Akuna, how long have I been with you?”  
Her face clouds with pain for a split second “Not long. Two weeks.”  
“Where are we?”  
“We’re in Australia, but we’re trying not to be.” she scoops up a handful of red dirt and presses it between her palms “We’re on a convoy leaving the country. You got no fucking idea what a convoy is so I’m gonna tell you now, it’s a bunch of refugees leaving a place under the protection of some Foremen. Sometimes the government organises them if they want to de-populate an area. Right now, I guess the DB is trying to empty out Australia. It’s happened before. She emptied out Singapore so she could stash the Egyptian Symps there-”  
“Symps?”  
“Ex-fucking-cuse me I am talking and it means sympathetic to the RED cause.”  
“RED?”  
“Ugh, I’ll tell you later, lemme explain one thing at a time. I guess the DB needs room for another dino-farm or something, because she’s moving everyone out of Australia. Not that there were much of us left to begin with. Basically only Brisbane and a few Aboriginal settlements were left.” She thumps her chest “I’m Aboriginal. I lived in Brisbane, like you. I mean, ok, you didn’t live in Brisbane but you came out of Brisbane like the rest of us.”  
Jason is getting more confused by the minute “Uh-huh. And when you met me I didn’t have any family or friends with me?”  
“Nah. You came out of an orphanage just like me. The same one in fact, which was really weird because I didn’t remember you being there ever even though all the other kids were insisting you’d been around all along. The orphanage kids got split up into separate convoys and I got stuck with you and we kinda ended up joining forces, since those bastards (she nods towards the other fire) were all sacred of me and you seemed to want to be on your own. We’ll be at the coast by sunset tomorrow. You know we coulda just left outta our own port since Brisbane is like, right the fuck on the water, but I guess Kym’s storms were too tough around there.”  
His heart skips a beat, plunges into his stomach and slips out through his shoes “Did you say Kym? As in the storm goddess Kym?”  
She nods, confused “How do you know her?”  
He swallows hard “Me and Kym go way back. Is she causing trouble again?”  
“Hell yeah she is. Ever since Khione started her siege Kym’s been pitching a bitch-fit and making storms so crazy most people can’t leave their ports. Listen, I’m not gonna tell you everything. The Foremen like to watch the news in the mornings so you can catch up on current events, but right now I just want to know one thing.”  
“What?”  
“Where the fuck were you, man? We needed you. Are you like, re-incarnated? I’ve seen that before. People are remembering their past lives a lot more now. They have moments like you’re having, when their previous consciousness wakes up in this new body and new life and they don’t know their friends.”  
Looking down at his hands, Jason inspects his palms closely. He hasn’t doubted for a moment that this is Hazel’s handiwork, and if it is she will have left a signature somewhere. She usually likes to –there! He shows Akuna his palm and points out a patch of very well-defined lines in them.   
“’HL’.” reads Akuna.  
“Hazel Levesque.” he whispers “She signs her work.”

 

Nightmares are not unusual.  
Jason has more nightmares than he has normal dreams, since the material never stops being scary. He dreams about the mouth of Tartarus as regularly as once a week even though he never set foot in that land, the impression it and the god made on him are impossible to wash away. Sometimes he watches Annabeth and Percy slipping into the dark, but more often than not he just sees the pit, gaping and waiting.  
He dreams about his eidolon possession all the time, the feeling of helplessness as if someone had booted him out of his body although he was still seeing through his own eyes, he was a useless witness as he and Percy fought to kill each other.  
And then of course there’s the usual assortment of run-of-the-mill nightmares like holding Piper as she dies or a Camp Half-blood where Leo never came back or Frank getting stuck in one of his animal forms and gradually devolving into that animal, bloodthirsty and brainless until they finally have to put him down because the Mars in him makes him vicious, or the one where Thalia and Nico are for some reason trapped in the prison from ‘The Walking Dead’ and Thalia’s trying to kill Nico because she thinks he caused it and then finally, that super weird one where he’s taking a test in college and Reyna and Annabeth are breathing down his neck whispering ‘failure’ on either side of him.  
But this is weird. This is demi-god level weird. Despite his wild imagination, Jason would never be able to dream up something like this on his own.   
Hades, or maybe Pluto, the lord of the underworld, the dead and all riches underneath the earth is on his knees scrubbing a bloodstain off the floor of what looks like a study.  
For a crazy moment Jason think it’s Nico, but he spots the long black ponytail and realises how tall the man must be when standing, recognising him as the father rather than the son. The resemblance is striking, though. If Nico were taller, kept his hair really really long and exuded a godly aura they would be like twins. When Jason squints, the god’s face changes very slightly, becoming a little more Hazel-ish. Either way it’s definitely Pluto/Hades.  
Weirdly, he is dressed in jeans ripped at the knees and a black T-shirt without a design. He may not be Nico but he looks like he robbed his son’s wardrobe. He wears a white surgical mask over his mouth and nose and scrubs the floor with a twisted rag.   
“That did not go as expected.” says a voice off to the left.  
Jason does a double-take in his dream, if such a thing is possible, as he sees the speaker. Another man. It is not his regal face nor his glossy black hair that surprises Jason- although the man is so impressive to look at he might as well have ‘THE BOSS’ tattooed on his noble brow- but the sheer size of him. The polished desk he sits behind and the room overall are much larger than a human would have use for, to accommodate his enormous size. Standing the man must be about two stories tall. The pen he is using to scribble notes in a ledger would be the length and width of Jason’s arm, and with the heavy and sharp nib at the end of it the pen could double up as a spear if the man had the need for one.  
“Yes Lord Eurymedon.” mutters Pluto/Hades.  
“Is that stain coming up?” he peers over the desk at the god, who is in human-ish proportions which makes him look like a hobbit compared to the man.  
“It will.” Hades/Pluto stops scrubbing for a second to wipe his forehead “Eventually.”  
Jason notice the bloodstain is golden, the colour of ichor.  
“I believe I’m going to wish I hadn’t done that.” Eurymendon pinches the bridge of his nose “Did you know the Egyptians bleed gold too? I always thought they would bleed sand or something similarly heathen. Blast it, boy, you know that blasted Sobek is one of Gaia’s favourites. I couldn’t tell you why, but she loves that asshole. I shouldn’t have lost my temper with him. Granted, it’s not as if he can do much to oppose me but…ugh…you don’t think this will come back to haunt me, do you?”  
Going by Hades/Pluto’s expression, he hopes it will “I couldn’t say sir. I doubt Lord Sobek will form a case against you.”  
“Yes, yes you’re right. Sobek will do everything in his power to hang onto his status. Did you see the way he looked at you when he came in? This sort of thing, scrubbing my floors and bringing me drinks, being a servant in a Titan or a Gigante household. He’d sell his mother to ensure that didn’t happen. Does he even have a mother?”  
Hades/Pluto winces as a blister bursts on his left index finger “Not that I’m aware of sir. I believe he came from the rivers of Egypt of his own accord.”  
“Strange group, those Egyptians,” Eurymendon shakes his great head and scratches something out in the ledger “On the bright side at least Sobek won’t think of disobeying me in the future.”  
“I doubt he will, sir.” agrees the god.  
He doesn’t look very godly to Jason. Normally, even in dreams a god’s power can be felt like a static charge or lightning in the air. The aura that pours off them could easily power a small city for a few days. But in this dream? The god is tired. The bags under his eyes are deep and dark –but it makes Jason want to smile as he thinks how bags under the eyes are sort of a fashion accessory with Hades/Pluto and his children- and his hair is kind of dull. Usually gods are ridiculously attractive and the sun bouncing off their hair is enough to blind someone for a couple of minutes.   
Hades/Pluto may still have turned heads and caused a few car crashes by walking down the street, but his beauty is not flawless. He has frown-lines and a sore spot on his bottom lip which must have formed from him biting it, which Jason catches sight of when he removes the mask to cough. There are several streaks of grey in his hair and scars criss-crossing his bare, pale arms. Hades/Pluto gives the impression of being fresh from a wood-chipper.  
Jason must have been staring a little too hard, because the god glances up. And looks him right in the eyes. A shiver shakes Jason’s physical body and his thoughts are blurred out by a single white-hot urge to run and hide. Only for a second though.  
What happens next is just as terrifying in its own right. The god of the dead and Underworld smiles. Jason hopes faintly that he hasn’t wet himself.  
Ok, so obviously he knows Jason is here and since he isn’t frantically gesticulating that he should get the hell out before Eurymendon notices him, it should be safe to stick around. Just as Jason finishes reassuring himself, the scene melts into darkness so rapidly it leaves an impression of the god of the dead seared into his eyelids.  
Where the hell is he now? Seriously, where is this? He’s never been here before and he doesn’t recognise a single person out of the assembly of weirdoes he is suddenly in the thick of.   
There’s a small woman with a knife that would make Annabeth jealous and she seems to be wearing a cloak made out of…pockets? A man is next to her with a strange sword curved like a question mark in his lap, rubbing the back of his neck and clearly in pain. The two of them are dark-haired and dark-skin, something vaguely Middle Eastern or African. He guesses they are some kind of gods, from the vibe. It’s similar to the tired but weighty pressure that surrounded Hades/Pluto.   
The rest of the people are ordinary mortals. Their ethnicities are diverse and there is no clear uniform among them, except for the fact that all of them are armed to the teeth with the most creatively wicked weapons Jason has ever seen. Stuff like bats with bronze nails wedged in them and knuckled-dusters with Imperial gold spikes, like a demigod street gang. All of them are battered or scorched too, so they must have just come out of a battle.  
Makes him glad he’s invisible.  
“So,” says the man “We’re kind of screwed, aren’t we?”  
“You’re not supposed to talk like that,” protests a man who looks Laotian “That’s our line, than you reassure us and we go on with the day with soaring hearts and fresh hopes.”  
The man shrugs “I’m out of reassurances to give. What do you want me to say?”  
“How about ‘the bitch has to melt eventually’?” suggest the pocket woman “Or ‘she’s just one measly goddess and both Neith and I floored bigger, badder monsters with one hand in our time’, or you know, something just basically encouraging.”  
She makes Jason nervous. Nervous like he needs to retreat into his den and gather his babies to his side- nervous like an animal that knows a predator is on its trail. Kind of like Artemis makes him nervous, but he isn’t worried he’s going to be speared in the balls around this particular goddess. This woman must be a hunting goddess too? Maybe the Egyptian goddess of the hunt, and now he wishes he knew his Egyptian mythos a well as he knows his Roman and Greek. The only person in his group that bothered to look into the Egyptians was Annabeth, and of course she would have to be the first of them to figure out there was yet another mythos wreaking havoc in the world.  
The man rolls his sleeve up painstakingly and inspects the wound there. Dried blood cakes his arm, covering up a gash that must be inches deep, down to the bone. Yep. Egyptians definitely bleed ichor.  
Someone from the mortals lets out a low whistle.  
“Who did that?” asks one of them.  
“A giant.” says the man “As much as it burns me to say this I seriously doubt we’re going to be making any more progress today. Take yourselves to the sick bay. Go back to your quarters. I don’t care, really, just do something more useful than standing around here.”  
They clear off, slowly and reluctantly. Some of them pause to talk with the woman, Neith, thanking her for her help today. Most of them pat the man on his good shoulder before they go. The man maintains a brave, if wan smile the entire time and it is only when the last one leaves the room and closes the door behind them that he grimaces and lowers himself to the floor.  
“Neith,” he gestures to his arm “Help me.”  
She produces a huge needle from the folds of her cloak and starts to stitch him up with a black thread without a warning. Jason flinches, remembering the times he has had to get stitches like that. Lucky for the god, Neith is a more gentle nurse than Reyna.  
“Did you mean what you said?” she asks.  
“What? About the battle? Yes I do believe this complex will be our graves-”  
“Not that, Rus, I’m talking about what you said earlier.”  
Jason can’t help but snort, despite the seriousness of the situation. A god named Rus. He likes that.  
Rus bites his lip as Neith pulls another stitch shut in his skin “What did I say?”  
“About Apollo.”  
If Jason had a physical body in that dream, he would be leaning forward now.  
Rus’s face clouds “Yes. I did mean that.”  
“You know…the world can never go back to the way it was. We’re not gonna be forgotten again. There’s no way we can. No matter how hard we work, gods and mortals and everything else together, it’s going to be centuries before we return to a semblance of what we were before. Maybe we won’t even have to go back to the age of…of chrome and steel and such, you know? The technology the magicians and demigods use is far superior to the technology the mortals were employing before the Green Fist smashed us.”  
“What are you getting at?” asks Rus through gritted teeth.  
“I’m saying it’s different. It was never this way before. We’ve always been separated by countries or religions or vows, but now none of that matters. You could stay with him without giving anything up. I suspect you and Apollo aren’t the only trans-mythos couple around. Besides, there’s nothing to keep you apart now.”  
“I don’t want to talk about this now.” says Rus.  
Neith sighs through her nose, but she doesn’t press the issue.  
Jason wonders why he is seeing this, or what the hell he is seeing for that matter. Two gods talking about relationships in a storage room? If the world actually is in post-apocalyptic disarray and under the control of Gaia, it seems there are more important things he could be seeing. For example, he could have been watching his friends, wherever they are, and getting some answers as to where he’s been and how long it has been since he ‘disappeared’, according to Akuna.  
Then the scene changes just as abruptly as it did before.  
Jason wishes it hadn’t.   
He thinks he’s in the Underworld. He has been down here plenty of times, questing, getting lost and following Nico or Hazel to their father’s palace for some awkward family business, but what this place in no way resembles the Underworld he is used to seeing. It is far too much to process. Jason has barely begun to absorb what he is seeing when a sharp kick is delivered to his middle and his physical body buckles around the blow.  
He blinks, blinded by the light.   
“Get up.” says Akuna “It’s time to go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is probably the last you'll hear of me before Christmas. To everyone who's celebrating, Merry Christmas. To everyone who's around people celebrating but not celebrating, seasons greetings and enjoy your vacations. To everyone who lives in a country where Christmas isn't a thing, I hope you have an exceptional Thursday.


	21. Party at Kituwa

Thalia Grace has rarely slept through a night in the past sixty years. Sometimes she manages it through the sheer force of exhaustion, but more often she’ll find herself waking up in the wee hours of the morning from a fierce nightmare, shivering and coughing and wishing to the gods she still had a brother to call for comfort. Granted, due to recent changes in her circumstances Thalia usually has something to do when she wakes up and that makes her feel marginally better.  
Tonight she slides out of bed quickly, instead of trembling under the sheets for a few minutes. He’s calling for her again. She pulls on her nightgown over her skimpy pyjamas –she doubts she’ll ever ditch the Hunter habit of sleeping in boxer shorts and nothing else- and heads to the next room, muttering to herself.  
“Here I come.” she pushes the door open.  
He is bundled up at the bottom of the bed, rocking back and forth under the sheets.  
Thalia stifles a yawn “What’s wrong?”  
“There’s people in the yard!” he pops his head through the blanket and gestures frantically to his open window.  
Thalia’s heart skips a beat “Teddy I told you, you have to sleep with the window closed!”  
“People in the yard!” he insists.  
She dodges around the mess of toys on the floor of his room and reaches to close the window, but stops cold when she looks outside. Teddy wasn’t lying.  
There are indeed ‘people’ in the yard. This isn’t the first time Thalia has seen these ‘people’. In fact, the ghosts of the Cherokees that lived in the area hundreds of years ago are a common sight. The silvery shapes of men and women that she sees roaming the field at night, or sometimes in the new forest- they’re harmless, pleasant company. When she’s alone in the house, she often takes comfort from knowing that friendly numbering into the thousands are just outside if she’s totally desperate for a conversation. She even has a few friends among them, although she has never asked their names. It’s safer for ghosts these days if they stay anonymous.  
But she has never seen them like this. The ghosts rush across the field, like fireflies in the distance. There men and women, and even the children whom she hardly ever sees. Their faces are flushed with real excitement and they don’t bother with the hushed tones ghosts prefer. Some of them shout, whoop and laugh. Others carry skins of drinks and woven baskets of food. This is also a very rare sight- ghosts will only conjure up the food of the death if there’s some kind of celebration being held, since the dead have no use for food or drink beyond frivolity.  
Gathering his courage, Teddy pads over to the window, wrapped up in his blanket, and gets on his tip-toes to peer outside “Told’ja so.”  
“Yes you did.”   
One of the ghosts Thalia recognises stops to wave, then hurries on and disappears into the glowing crowd.  
“What are they doing?” asks Teddy.  
“Search me.” she picks him up so he can have a better view “Maybe the council of the chiefs called a meeting?”  
“The who?”  
“You know, the chiefs. You called them ‘the tall men’. We met them last month.”  
That was kind of embarrassing. Thalia doesn’t take Teddy out into the forest much, and for a good reason, but he can’t quite grasp the dangers monsters and loyalists working under the Green First present to a young demigod. Whenever she gives him permission to go further than the fence around the yard (the ghosts are walking straight through it, which they’ve never done before) he gets drunk on the freedom and runs around in huge circles, seeing how far he can get before she gets nervous and calls him back to her side. Usually he doesn’t get that far. Last month, Thalia had to take him with her while she hunted because there was no one at home to watch him. A disaster from the start, when he scared off prey a mile in every direction with a scream because he had a splinter, to finish when he stumbled into an assembly of the ghosts of the various Cherokee chieftains who had owned the land and died on it over the years, discussing some very solemn business.   
They were all very cool about having a loud, sticky four-year-old interrupt their meeting and waved away Thalia’s profuse apologies. Still, she doesn’t want a repeat of the fiasco if it can be helped.  
Lucky for her, she is not alone tonight.  
Thalia balances Teddy on her hip and heads down the hall.  
She knocks on the door furthest from hers “Ella? The ghosts are acting very very weird.”  
Teddy mimics the knock “Wake up Ella!”  
There is a scuffle, a thump and a curse and Ella cracks the door open, yawning widely “What?”  
Thalia gestures helplessly over her shoulder “Come and see.”  
Ella shuffles to the front door, stumbling over the tie of her bathrobe a couple of time. It takes a moment for her to unlatch every lock, long enough for her to notice the clamour of excited voices outside. Finally, she gets the door open and hops down the front steps.  
Bewildered, she waves to the throng of ghosts. She scratches her downy hair with a claw that doubles as a can-opener “Well.”  
Thalia sets Teddy down on the grass, trusting him to stick to her side “You don’t think this is Nxy’s doing?”  
Ella shrugs “Don’t know. Ghosts here don’t answer to Nyx or Ahklys.”  
‘Don’t know’ is never an encouraging thing to hear from Ella. Her gift of prophecy may have substantially diminished like that of the rest of the population of prophets, but she has retained her excellent of the Sibylline Books. A surprising amount of information concerning the fall of Olympus and the Pyramids to Gaia’s powers was detailed in the books, but unfortunately Ella only became aware of those passages in her memory about two years into the disaster. Sometimes they’re helpful. For example, the passage that predicted the coming of a ‘son of sea and sky’ that finally gave Thalia an idea of how to extract herself from the Hunters’ vows. Sometimes the passages are just nonsensical, trivial details like the one that talked about how some obscure town in Latvia would experience two days of solid rain.  
Ella blurts them out at random intervals. If it sounds valuable, Thalia digs out her old equipment, hails Reyna and relays the message. If not, she and Ella laugh and get on with their day.  
It disturbs Thalia that Ella has no idea what’s going on. It’s not that she knows everything –she doesn’t know what she knows until she has recited it- but she generally has a very good idea of what the events she is witnessing are going to lead up to. Plus, the swarming of the ghosts seems kind of important. In fact, too important to let it slide.  
“Ella…will you be ok to stay here alone?”  
She purses her beak, which is always weird to see “You go to investigate?”  
Thalia nods “Be good for Ella, ok?”  
Teddy reaches up for the customary high-five they exchange whenever they part “Can I stay up late?”  
Thalia shucks him under the chin “No.”  
Ella narrows her eyes at the crowd, shifting her weight uncomfortably “Take your bow.” she says.

The dead are dancing for the first time in many years.  
Memory stretches back across centuries for even the freshest ghosts. These are the spirits of people who died long before any mortal currently walking the earth was born, people who have never set foot inside Elysium or the Fields of Punishment and who never will. They exist within their own system, although a little outside influence has never been met with hostility.  
This place had a great many names when the first generations of these ghosts still breathed air, and over time it came to be known as Ferguson Field, a supposedly irrelevant patch of land on a farmer’s property made important only by the presence of a burial mound known as Kituwa. To the farmer, it was just a chunk of land he had to handle carefully, as it was to the majority of the public. However, there were a few, less than 1 out of 500, who did a double-take when they saw the place.  
They did not see a five-foot rise in the ground. They saw a mound at least double that height topped by a structure which held a large flame, attended by silvery, wispy shapes. The surrounding area was crawling with those same shapes.  
This is what Thalia sees whenever she passes the site.  
Little changed the area when the rest of the world fell under the influence of the Green Fist. There were a few conquests to round up the ghosts and cart them off to the Underworld for a Rinse-and-Repeat, but each one of those was met with failure. The land seemed to bend itself around the groups, so that every turn they took dumped them in the exact same spot they started out in. Sometimes they were met with outright threats of a war if they took another step further, dissuaded by hails of stones thrown by invisible hands from trees or by the raspy whispers of voices that hadn’t spoken to the living in a long time. Eventually the order to ‘leave it’ came from Gaia herself. Obviously, whatever uses she had planned for the land were not worth the trouble it would be to claim it.  
Thalia has never had any of that kind of trouble. In fact, the invitation to build a modest home on this land came from one of the chieftains on the council that apparently governs the ghosts. When she asked, he made some vague allusions to returning a favour to an old friend. She decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, built the house and gave it to Tyson and Ella, who were already situated nearby for their work. Five years later, she joined them.  
And now she’s wading through the forest and the ghosts, her bow on her back and a knife at her belt. Some of them greeted her, but most of them are talking excitedly in a language she doesn’t understand. Towards the centre of the forests one of her ‘friends’, for lack of a better word, melted out of the darkness.  
Like the rest of the ghosts, she has never told Thalia her name. She appears dressed in the same front-seam moccasin every time, her single pair of earrings catching some ghostly light. Thalia recognises her by the tear in the back of her moccasin, which she once told her was caused by a bear slashing her in the back and causing the wound that killed her. She’s never been sure if the ghost   
is joshing her or not, but it’s nice to see a familiar face.  
“Hey.”  
The woman nods in greeting “Good to see you here.” these ghosts seem to be able to turn modern English on and off like a fountain, no matter the era they died in.  
She suspects the situation would be the same if she were a Igbo or a Spanish-speaker.  
“So…kinda a silly question, but what’s going on?”  
The woman smiles “Something good, finally.”  
“I think I know what it is...but I’m not sure.” Thalia feels her throat growing tight in spite of herself.  
“Well what do you think it is?”  
“This afternoon I got a call from a guy who’s been dead for sixty years. I’m beginning to think he might not have been dead at all.”  
“Just sleeping.” suggests the woman.  
“Do you know something about this that I don’t?”  
Thalia clambers over a thick, fallen trunk with a curse. The woman passes through it as if parting curtains.  
“Not yet,” she says “I’m not that important as the hierarchy goes. Just one of the crowd, but we have all heard the rumours.”  
Thalia doesn’t know if she likes where this is going “Rumours?”   
“Concerning the contents of Kituwa.”  
She’s determined to be as mysterious as possible, but Thalia isn’t having any of that “Kituwa is a burial ground and the place where the sacred flame burns as well. What else is there to it?”  
“More.” says the woman “There was an addition a little while back. Nothing anyone would have really noticed unless they were one of us.”  
“Is it Percy?” she blurts.  
“Percy?” she shakes her head “Not Percy.”  
“Jason?”   
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the nuts- living almost next door to the baby brother she mourned?  
“Not Jason.”  
Thalia’s heart is in her mouth “Oh…it must be Piper, right?”  
It is kind of obvious. Piper’s human half is Cherokee, and this is Cherokee land. If Piper was going to hide somewhere, it makes sense that it would be here under the protection of a score of ghosts of her ancestors. Her mind buzzes like it’s full of wasps and the woman hasn’t even confirmed that it is Piper. Before Thalia can ask, she picks up the pace and weaves deeper into the crowd at a pace Thalia can’t hope to match, since she can’t melt through the landscape.   
“Shit.” she scratches the back of her head, pausing to think.  
Apparently, somebody is alive. Meaning the call she got from Percy yesterday may have actually, really been Percy trying to get into contact with Tyson. She refused to believe him. Of course she did! That wasn’t the first time she had gotten a call from someone claiming to be Percy, although there was usually muffled giggling in the background, and never on Tyson’s old cell either. In fact she didn’t even know the old network the camps used was still functioning. Still, it had been a long, tiring day and after sixty years of false hopes and pranks of that ilk, she wasn’t going to whip herself up into a frenzy about it.  
And there’s no sense in building herself up for another disappointment. Ghosts are never easily tricked but that doesn’t mean they can’t be tricked. It might not be Piper. It might not be anything.  
Only one way to find out. She presses on through the woods. The sound of voices swells as she gets deeper into the heart of the forest. This forest is relatively new- it popped up under mysterious circumstances one day, encircling Kituwa. The ghosts probably had a hand in it. They let Thalia come in to hunt, knowing with her Hunter training that she’ll respect the prey and the people of the land, although hopefully she’ll only shoot the prey.  
Finally, she breaks through to the clearing. Kituwa flickers in the centre of a crowd, the flame burning white and bright. For some reason, the dead are dancing.  
Thalia has never seen anything like it before. Rings of dancers wind around Kituwa. New arrivals are dropping whatever they brought with them off over by a group of ghosts who seem to have taken on the task of cooking, then many of them rush into the rings and join the dance. The singing raises her hackles. The songs of the dead are not easy for the living to hear.  
“Thalia!” the sound of her name is almost drowned out in the song.  
But she recognises that voice. She hasn’t heard it for so long that logically, she should have completely forgotten the sound of it, but she hasn’t.  
“Piper!”  
And it is. She peels away from a circle of men and rushes to her. The ghosts part in front of her. Thalia opens her arms and braces herself just in time to catch her. She doesn’t quite believe this is happening. Even though Piper is solid and breathing and she can feel a pulse in her arms, which are wound tight around her neck.   
“Thank the gods!” cries Piper “A familiar face!”  
“You’re alive?” gapes Thalia “But you’re dead!”  
“No I’m not.” she puts Thalia’s hand over her heartbeat “Check it out. Beating heart.”  
“But…what?” she doesn’t know what to say or how to say it.  
How can she possibly condense everything that needs to be explained and shared into words? She has so many questions, but are they even worth asking?  
“The others? Are they with you?” that one definitely is.  
Her face falls “No. Have I really been gone for-”  
“Sixty years? Yeah, you have.” she doesn’t mean to snap, but she can’t stop herself “All seven of you and Nico too. You guys just disappeared out of thin air and the next minute the sky was falling and the earth was shaking and monsters were climbing out of the ground and the Mist was gone too. Olympus fell…I mean it literally fell. It broke into pieces above the clouds and the towers, the houses, all that rubble, it all came crashing down on New York. The oceans boiled and the sun went out. Everything went wrong. The gods waged a war for the first year and all we lowly demigods and mortals could do was run for cover. Remember Madagascar? Well they blew it off the face of the planet, and half of India too.”  
Thalia manages to stop herself, seeing the tears in Piper’s eyes.  
“They told me I was gone.” she whispers.  
Thalia glances over Piper’s shoulder at the chieftains “Did they say for how long?”  
“A long time. That’s all they would say.”  
She laughs bitterly “A life time.”  
“What happened to the camps?”  
“They were destroyed. Clarisse LaRue caught the sky before it could crush Camp Half-blood, but I heard it flattened Camp Jupiter.”  
Piper glances up at the star-filled sky with alarm that is almost comical “The sky fell in?”  
“Not really. It’s complicated, but basically the Egyptian god of the wind, Shu, was attacked and it was his job to keep Nut, the sky, and Geb the earth, apart but when he was attacked he lost focus in some areas so some storm spirits brought down the sky specifically on the camps and Clarisse was stuck there for about an hour until Shu got back on his feet.” she stops to inhale deeply, feeling light-headed “So, yeah. Shit went down. Basically everyone died and everyone who didn’t ran away.”  
“Reyna?”  
“Oh she’s fine. She’s better than fine. She’s in charge of the Hunters now.” not that that is a good place to be right now, considering the state of the Hunters, but Piper’s got enough on her mind already without having to worry about trivial things like sieges and massive internal corruption.  
But her face clouds “Wait, aren’t you in charge of the Hunters?”  
Here comes the embarrassing part “Not anymore…listen I don’t really want to get into that business in front of these guys.” she gestures around them at the ghosts, who seem to be politely ignoring their reunion. “Come with me. It’s safe for you to leave, right?”  
“I think so,” she glances at the chieftains “We had just wrapped up our conversation when you came.”  
“What were they telling you?”  
Piper shrugs “I’m not really sure.” she rubs her temples “I mean, I think they told me about the Underworld, but I don’t know what they were talking about.”  
“The Underworld? Which one?” asks Thalia, forgetting Piper has no concept of the Egyptian mythos “Never mind, never mind. Let’s just get out of here.”  
Suddenly, Piper wriggles away “Hold on…I’m not ready to leave yet. I have to get my stuff.”  
Before Thalia can protest, Piper is wading through the crowd towards Kituwa.   
“It is her.” says a voice behind her.  
Thalia turns around and finds the entire council of the chieftains behind her. Teddy is right to call them the ‘tall men’; they are enormously tall, almost like giants. It’s probably more down to their spiritual presence than the way they were shaped in their corporeal years, but their size still makes Thalia feel profoundly vulnerable. She can’t look them in the eye. She doubts it would be a good idea, anyway.  
“How do you know?”  
“We were told.” says one of them.  
“She was not held here, but at another site further away from here so as not to disturb us.” adds another.  
“However, we have held certain items for her.” continues yet another.  
“Her sleep was arranged in such a way that we would be alerted the moment it was disturbed. We concealed her from the attentions of the parties that saw fit to build upon our land.”  
Thalia thinks of Polybotes’ castle a few miles to the south, where Tyson is employed and the goddesses Nyx and Ahklys visit frequently. Hiding Piper there would be like dressing a chicken up as a fox and tossing it into the wild. How could that have worked? There’s no way she’s going to figure this out on her own, and maybe that’s for the best.  
Piper is back, in the exact same condition as she was when she disappeared. The others will follow her.  
“Got it!” shouts Piper from the top of Kituwa. She hefts a bag above her head “I think this is like everything I own! Good thing I got out of that glamour. Gods, you should have seen the thing I was wearing before I got here! It sort of melted off me, but I was decked out like a dracaena. Good old Hazel. She got me through a monster ball in that thing. Funny story, I’ll tell you on the way to your house.”


	22. Fourteen years before the end of the world

The child is too close to the ocean.  
He can’t be more than four or five and the height and suction of the waves are too powerful for one of his size to resist. And yet, his mother isn’t concerned at all. Sometimes Poseidon wonders about that.  
Sally Jackson may not be far into her twenties, but she is mature enough to know that a child will not simply take care of itself. He has seen her keep her child glued to her side as they walk through New York, protecting him from the bustling pedestrians and the traffic. She still sits in the bathroom while he takes his baths. She won’t let him eat spicy foods or sour candy, even when he begs for them with tears in his eyes. She knows what she’s doing, despite her age. Poseidon knows she spends her lunch-breaks in the ‘parenting’ section of a nearby library, making lists of scary behaviours to watch for that might indicate her son is going to grow up to be socially stunted in some manner, and the symptoms of diseases so she will know the difference between a headache and meningitis.  
Sometimes, he compares notes with his nephew Hephaestus. While Hephaestus has no restrictions on the amount of demigods he produces nor the amount of time he can spend skulking in the corners of their lives, he does prefer to bury himself in his work and forget he has children until one of them sends an especially urgent or interesting prayer up. However, he keeps an eye on a few of them. Hera suggested that he watch one of his kids in Texas named something ridiculous like Leosthyne or Leopold –something along those lines. His mother, either Emerald or Ermine, has had a difficult time of it brining up a mysteriously produced, apparently fire-breathing child in a ‘painfully Catholic’ family.  
When Hephaestus gets curious (he rarely does), Poseidon tells him he’s just wondering what it must be like to raise a child in the hustle and bustle of the modern American life, saying it seems easier to get lost in the system here than it ever was in Greece or Rome. He’ll babble like this for a time until Hephaestus politely tells his uncle he is boring him, then he escapes, feeling secure in the knowledge that at least Sally is doing better than poor Effie. She may not be in a better situation financially, but at least the danger of her son burning the house down is minimal.  
Percy doesn’t seem to know he has powers.  
He knows he likes the ocean a lot, though he has never played with other children at the beach so he doesn’t know how much freedom Sally gives him in the water. Today, Percy seems blissfully unaware that he has caused a small whirlpool to form around the part of the shallows he sits in. He only knows he is at Montauk, his favourite place in the world and therefore, everything is awesome.   
Sally scrawls in a notebook, recording her latest short story. She rarely gets the time to edit and the way her life is right now, she will never get the time to publish. Recently the awful, stinking man she has begun to keep company with has advised her to give up the game while she’s behind. He assures her she will never write anything that will bring real money into the house, as if the house is already his.  
The thought of that man becoming a part of the same household as Percy makes Poseidon want to tear his beard out and sic one of those sewer crocodiles on his gelatinous ass. The only thing that stops him is the knowledge that Sally is smart and she would never keep the useless fart around unless she saw some concealed merit Poseidon was missing.  
At least what’s-his-face-Ugliano can’t follow them to Montauk. Poseidon arranged that himself. When Ulgiano came on the scene, Poseidon set a shark to tail him the next time he went near ports where some of his poker chums work. Ulgiano noticed the grey fin following him wherever he went and has become profoundly uncomfortable near any body of water bigger than a bathtub. It’s times like those he wishes Percy’s existence didn’t have to be a secret from Olympus, just so he could tell the story and exchange high-fives with the other moms and dads for showing that mortal step-whatever who’s the boss.  
Or just so that he could talk to someone about how awful it feels to have a child. But no- he’ll accept the silence on the matter as his punishment for going against one of the mighty Thunder-pants’ commands.  
Sally and Percy are totally oblivious to his presence. Even if they happened to look his way, he has wrapped a cloak of mist around him so thick only a god would be able to see through it.  
“Hello uncle.”  
Speak of the devil.  
Poseidon draws his trident and flicks it up to his niece’s throat. Artemis is as stealthy as ever- he didn’t realise she was there until she spoke.  
She pushes the prong of the trident away with a look of disdain “No need for that kind of nonsense. I’m not here to hurt him.” she gestures to Percy, who is making a sandcastle on top of his own head “I am here on a hunt, alone.”  
Artemis has appeared in her favoured form as a girl of about fourteen or thirteen. She is dressed in the usual silvery get-up with a bow on her back and a dagger at her belt. The carcass of some nameless monster is slung dripping over her back. She drops the carcass and rolls her shoulders back, groaning.  
Poseidon’s heart is in his throat “How long have you known about him?”  
“Your girlfriend isn’t quite as sensible as I had hoped. She prayed to me, you know, when she was giving birth. She begged me to ease the pain at least until she got her epidural.”  
He sighs “Silly woman.”  
“You have no idea what the pain of childbirth is like.” scoffs Artemis, flicking her braid over her shoulder “Any woman who knows I exist would have taken that chance. She hasn’t given me a second thought since then, if you’re wondering.”  
“She doesn’t pray to me.” mutters Poseidon “I told her not to do anything that could attract the attention of the gods. Besides, what do you know of childbirth, O Eternal maiden?”  
“Being that I share the duties of protection of pregnant women with the Cow Queen, I would say I know enough to have the authority on the subject.”  
Poseidon fans his face “Consider me burned, niece.”  
“Watch out for the rocks!” shouts Sally.  
Percy notices he is being sucked towards an outcropping of black rock. So he stands up and wades through a wave that goes past his waist and plunks himself down in a safer area.  
Artemis narrows her eyes “Evidently he’s going to be a very dangerous demigod when he grows up.”  
“When he grows up. For now, he’s just a child. He doesn’t even know what he can do.”  
Artemis snorts “Oh really? I saw him strangle those cobras in his crib. He is hardier than the average demigod.”  
Glowering, Poseidon turns on her “I hope I don’t discover you were behind that particular fiasco.”  
“I just happened by.”  
He snorts “Then your timing is even more impeccable than we give you credit for. I find it hard to believe you ‘happened by’ on the same day I have come to see my son.”  
She gives him a venomous look that doesn’t belong on a face so young “Why do you come see him? Are you proud of yourself?”  
“Of course I am.”  
“I never thought you would be the first to spit in the face of the prophecy and the law. Father seemed to be the most likely candidate for that kind of tomfoolery, even though he’s the one who outlawed it in the first place.”  
He sighs. How can he get this across to a goddess who never has had children and never will, yet insists on coaching a game she has never played? He can’t, but at least he can argue with her. It’s kind of a relief that a god other than him knows about Percy. Ok, Artemis isn’t exactly going to offer her services as a confidant. She doesn’t like Poseidon very much, or any of her family member for that matter, except for Hades and that’s mainly because he has been the most faithful to his spouse. She prefers to stay on the road and out of Olympus with her entourage of similarly-minded, immortal pre-teens. Truth be told, most of Olympus prefer it that way too. On the rare occasions Artemis does come home she scowls her way through the councils and sharpens her knives in the back at parties, and all of the men lock their doors at night because Artemis has been known to sneak into the rooms of guys who have recently been a tad ‘rough’ with the ladies and cut off certain pieces as revenge. Of course, those pieces will grow back, but the humiliation of having a part of one’s manhood mounted on Artemis’s trophy wall with the engraving ‘sex fiend’ or ‘serial cheater’ is not something one can recover from.  
What a charming thing to worry about while he watches his young son play.  
“You know, the prophecy doesn’t specifically say ‘raze’. There’s a distinct possibility Percy will ‘preserve’ Olympus. He might not even be the one the prophecy is about.”  
Artemis scoffs again “To date, he is the only child living child of the Big Three. Now if I found out Hades still has some brats floating around then I might agree with you, but Persephone assures me Hades hasn’t had a fling with a mortal since that last disaster that claimed the whole family. Honestly I don’t know why he thought he could get away with playing house with that fool of a woman.” the slight grin in the corner of her mouth suggests she thinks he has no idea what she’s talking about.  
“Ah, yes, the di Angelo family.”  
Her eyes widen “You know of them?”  
“Zeus brags about it when he’s had a few too many. Killed the mother, the sister and the little brother in one fell swoop he says. Right in front of Hades.” he shivers in spite of the warm day “Killed a ten year old boy at his mother’s feet…I don’t suppose I have to tell you that if you ever tell anyone else of my son’s existence I will make a barbeque of your Hunters and rip your spine out through your nose to use as toothpick?”  
She rolls her eyes “No need to get personal, uncle. Believe me I have no intentions of telling anyone about Percy.”  
For some reason, it gets right up Poseidon’s nose to hear her using his son’s name “I’m afraid I don’t trust you.”  
“Then toss me into the sea and call a feeding frenzy.” Artemis stoops and retrieves her carcass “I’m going now. Zoë will be missing me by now.”  
“Of course I’m proud.”  
“Pardon?”  
Poseidon looks her in the eye “Wouldn’t you be? I’ve lived for millennia and I haven’t done much to speak of in that time. I’ve guided a couple of heroes down the right paths and set up a few cities, plagued a lot more and destroyed more than I can count. I have killed more times than you have hunted, I’m sure. What effect has that had? Not a very big one, looking at the modern world. when we were alive in the minds of the world, we were tyrannical, brutal, hungry… now we are memories and yet…as a ghost, I have done more good for the world just by putting that kid in it than I ever did from my throne.”  
Artemis is silent for a minute.  
She glances from him to Percy then back again “Why are you telling me this?”  
He shrugs “Because I have no one else to tell, I suppose.”  
“You can’t watch him forever. You’ll have to keep your distance when he gets older.”  
Poseidon looks back to his son “I know. That’s why I’m logging in some good hours right now. Happy hunting, Artemis.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just got to thinking about how the gods have human emotions and therefore, they must form attachments to their kids in some way. Hades lets Nico hang around when he wants to and turned a blind eye to Hazel's ressurection, Poseidon helps Percy on quests and sometimes Zeus even flings a lightning bolt Jason's way sometimes.  
> Maybe the reason they steer clear of their kids is because they know the mortal blood in them has condemned them to the same fate as the rest of the mortals-aging and eventual death.  
> The worst thing a parent can do is to outlive their children, so it must be easier to pretend you haven't got any.


	23. Torture Porn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pardon the rude, random delay. I was in India for a week and I didn't have time to post a note about going on vay-cay, what with the packing and the visa-chasing and all.

Percy is halfway up the tree before he notices he has started to climb. The roar of the sluggish river, more like a death rattle, unnerved him while he listened to it in the distance. As he walked away into the sparse fields behind the factory, he couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like if the river burst its banks and waves after waves of putrid muck flowed across the land. It’s almost physically painful to think of, but he can’t force his mind onto other subjects. He sees the black water chasing him, eager to clog his sinuses with acid-like water and fill his lungs and stomach with pollutants that have been pickling in each other for thirty years. He sees the naiad lurching after him on top of the water, which is a carpet of filth, and sees her reaching down his throat.  
And before he knows it he’s scaling a scraggly tree to the topmost branches.   
“I must be going nuts,” he looks down, dizzy from the height “I’m imagining evil naiad tsunamis and zipping up trees like a monkey-man without noticing.” he sighs, missing Annabeth “My brain is stuffed with seaweed.”  
His limbs seem to know where they’re going without his help- muscle memory, just like the way he fights with Riptide. His moves are so practiced he hardly needs to think about the action to get it done. That’s weird. Percy’s never been much one for climbing trees, but like most half-bloods he can accomplish most anything if he’s scared and hyper enough. Besides, it seems like a good idea to climb a tree. He’s not sure where the idea came from, but it does make sense. The treetop affords him a great view of his surroundings so he can see to the river and the ugly complex to his right all the way to the border of a thick forest to his left. The screen of dry leaves over his head gives him some cover as well so any air-borne monsters that might be floating around will have to look twice to see him.   
“Good idea,” he heaves himself up and settles on a wide bough “Wish I knew where it came from.”  
He manoeuvres his pack into his lap and unzips it. No wonder the pack is bursting at the seams. It’s completely full. It looks like how he packs his regular back-pack when preparing for another summer at the camp. Lots of clothes, a couple of books, a bit of stationary and a whole lot of deadly weapons. He plucks an unfamiliar wallet off the top of the pile and flicks it open. There are a couple of bills, a library card for the ‘Jupiter Archives’, whatever that means, and a photo of Annabeth tucked into a clear pocket. At least, he thinks it is Annabeth. Similar to the state he has found himself in, the rest of Annabeth’s baby-fat has been stripped right off. Her cheekbones are now high and her chin a little less rounded, but she’s still, he decides loyally, the most beautiful girl in the world. Her hair is longer and seems to be turning grey in some places. That’s common enough for half-bloods- some of the older campers go totally grey by their 20th birthdays from the sheer stress of survival. He can’t help but feel offended it seems to be happening to his girlfriend.   
Percy sighs through his nose, more confused than ever. Whatever time-zone in his lifetime Kronos stuck Percy in, it comforts him to know he’s with Annabeth. The smile she is giving the camera warms him inside-out.   
Underneath the wallet, there is a strange device Percy has never seen before. The object is made of smooth, seamless metal on one side and has a black, plastic covering on the other side. On an impulse he slides his thumb across the bottom of the black side. It blazes itself to life, revealing itself to be a screen and asks for a password. Percy thinks for a moment then struggles with the touch-screen keyboard to type in ‘O’Leary’.  
He’s in.  
“Is this a phone?” he turns it over in his hands, marvelling at the little slice of technology “But this is useless. Sit on this one time and it’s dead.”  
He presses the thumbnail labelled contacts and scrolls through them. The only names he recognises in his contacts list are Thalia, Nico, Annabeth, Tyson, Clarisse, then Stoll 1 and Stoll 2. The rest of them are just as mysterious as the phone itself. These are the people the naiad mentioned earlier. The names make about as much sense to Percy as a foreign language. Who are these people? Are they names at all, or some kind of code that might help him figure out what’s going on if he deciphers it?   
Somehow, the last thing doesn’t seem plausible.  
As he stares at the names, the back of his neck starts to twinge again. He feels like he should be drowning in a wave of memories. Why hasn’t it all clicked in his head yet? Again, he has to ask, is there even anyone to remember? He’s getting just the vaguest impression something, from looking at the names. A flicker of firelight, a static shock. The wrinkled grey skin of an elephant. A brown hand swiping dirt over gemstones, burying them in furtive movements by the side of a road. A whole lot of black hair wound up in a leaking braid.   
Fragments of memories. What if it’s just his imagination? He could be just inventing ways for these people to look, stuff that seems appropriate from the sounds of their names. He gets the feeling this ‘Frank’ guy is honest and earnestly clumsy, a terrible liar and probably built like a tank. ‘Piper’ must have a nice voice and a pretty face, and he gets the impression she, or he, would fight fast, with a knife, sort of like Annabeth but less badass because Annabeth’s knife skills are immeasurable in their badassness.   
For some reason, the name ‘Jason’ makes him want to grab an umbrella and run for cover. ‘Reyna’ makes him want to brush his clothes clean frantically and look as straight and proper as possible to avoid mother-like criticisms, punctuated by a whack on the back with the flat of a sword.  
Percy swallows. His headache never really went away, but now it’s returned with a vengeance. Even with his seaweed brain, it’s pretty clear something in his mind has been walled off, that there are a cache of critical memories sealed off from him for sinister purposes.   
His finger hovers over ‘Jason’. He doesn’t know who ‘Jason’ is, but ‘Jason’ feels like the name of a solid, reliable guy. He considers calling ‘Jason’, and decides against it. Better to start with what he knows.   
Tyson doesn’t pick up the first time he calls. So Percy calls again, less optimistic. He listens to the drilling ring tone and surveys the fields, the complex. The smell of the smoke is even thicker at this height. There’s a sickly-sweet undertone to the smoke scent, something much heavier and choking. Percy is pretty familiar with the smell of decay and blood. He doesn’t really want to imagine what goes on in that place, but the images are already rushing through his mind. Strangely, he’s following the water in in his mind. Through a dark tunnel of piping out into a channel that runs through a factory floor, where a network of gutters trace past cages lining the wall and inside the cages there are-  
“Hello?”  
Percy nearly drops the phone “Tyson?”  
“No,” the voice on the other end of the phone is cold and suspicious “He’s not here.”  
A knot of dead forms in Percy’s stomach “Where is he?”  
“Who’s calling? How did you get this number?” it’s Thalia who has picked up. “You want to talk to Tyson? Then you need to explain to me how this phone suddenly starts going after twenty years without being touched and why the hell I should even think about handing you over to Tyson.”  
Definitely Thalia “Thalia, it’s me.”  
“I don’t know any ‘me’s,” she snaps “I’m going to hang up unless you give me a good reason not to in the next four seconds.”  
“It’s Percy!” he blurts “Seaweed brain! Son of Poseidon, Tyson’s brother, Annabeth’s boyfriend, your stupid guy-friend that almost got killed in the Underworld last year! Remember that? Remember you and Nico had to take turns carrying me and I kept puking phlegm all over our shoes?”  
The other end of the line is silent for a moment “Percy is dead.”  
“No Percy isn’t dead,” he checks underneath his shirt for some kind of fatal wound, just in case he is dead without knowing it “Percy’s on the phone trying to convince Thalia it’s Percy on the phone! I’m Percy and I’m not dead!”  
“Tell me something only Percy knows.” she insists, sound on the verge of tears, which Percy has rarely heard from Thalia.  
Something only he knows about Thalia “You’re afraid of heights.”  
She pauses “Everyone knows that.”  
“No they don’t…do they?” he would remember the scandal if that particular phobia came out.   
“I’m hanging up.”  
“Whoa, wait! Thalia, it’s me! I’m pretty sure it’s me, ok, but I’m in this weird body. Weird and older and I don’t know what’s going on so if you’re gonna hang up than will you at least tell me how old I am?”  
“You’re nineteen.”  
Percy gulps “I’m sixteen. Also I have a splinter. I shouldn’t be getting splinters.”  
She takes a deep breath “Listen, whoever this is I really don’t appreciate this. In fact if I find out who this is I’m going to track you down and shove a spear up your ass, am I clear?”  
A hysterical giggle erupts out of Percy before he can stop it “’A stick sharpened at both ends’!” he says.  
He’s confusing himself worse than the contents of the bag and Thalia and Geryon’s ultra-stables combined. What did he just quote?   
“’Lord of the Flies’,” Thalia sounds hesitant and hopeful, suddenly “Do you know what that book is?”  
“My favourite.” blurts Percy “I hate it because I know it’s true. I know it’s how we really are. We could all be as bad as the monsters we fight without a conch.”  
The pain focuses like a drill bit in the back of his neck. He grits his teeth and shakes his head. What he just said- he has no idea where that came from. Annabeth has mentioned that book a couple of times, but he has never read it. He certainly shouldn’t know it well enough to be quoting it.  
Well as long as he has Thalia on the phone, he should try to clear up some of the other confusions “Thalia, who are all these people in my contacts? Who’s Leo? Who’s Frank? Who’s Piper? And since when is it safe for demigods to use cell phones? Gods, I should be swarmed with monsters by now but nothing is attacking me! What the hell is going on? I’m so confused and I have a splinter. How am I getting a splinter? I didn’t hop into the Styx so I could keep getting splinters!”  
He gets the head of the splinter between his teeth and pulls it out from the flesh between his finger and thumb, cussing in Ancient Greek and, for some really weird reason, Spanish.  
Thalia is confused too now “What do you mean ‘who’s Leo’? Who do you think taught you to swear in Spanish? So are you trying to trick me, torment me or just confuse me?”  
“I can’t speak Spanish.” protests Percy.  
“Yeah you can’t, but you hang around a guy who can.” Thalia’s tone grows icy again “That’s enough, alright? I know you’re not Perseus Jackson. Ok, obviously you’re trying to cover up the gaps in your intimate knowledge of his team by pretending to be Percy when he was sixteen and still had the Achilles dealie going on, but it’s just not working. You’re just not convincing me, so I’m going to hang up now.”  
And she does.  
Percy stares at the phone, caught somewhere between bewildered and offended that she hung up on him. He tries calling again, but she won’t pick up.  
That’s kind of alright with him. He doesn’t like to use cell phones, and for a good reason. Using a cell phone as a demigod is kind of the same as pulling down his pants, painting a target on his ass and dancing around in front of a bunch of archers. Still, he has to do something. He can’t ignore what Thalia told him either. The naiad too. Sixty years.  
Is he missing three years or sixty-three years? Sixty is just too crazy.  
Maybe Geryon’s stables could have swelled to that size in three years, but it’s kind of unthinkable that Camp Half-blood would allow one of their enemies to expand an operation this far- the Camp authorities don’t like it when monsters run companies and stuff. Besides, Geryon is kind of Percy’s personal enemy. Wouldn’t the guy have shown up on a quest or something to take another crack at claiming Percy’s life? And how did he reform so quickly? If Percy’s memory serves, Nico said Geryon would probably take a long time to re-form because of the way he died, with godly-intervention.  
Speaking of Nico, why does Nico have a cell? And why does Percy have that number? Nico hates him. Sorta. Percy has no idea if Nico really does hate him or just hates people in general but he did sort of get his sister killed. He’s not sure if they’re cool or what. Maybe Nico did get him to take a dip in the Styx, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he likes Percy now.  
Yeah, that bro-ship there is a minefield and it would hurt Percy’s head to think about even if he didn’t already have that headache concentrated at the back of his neck. He stares at the blasted fields around him.  
What kind of place is this anyway? The trees and sickly and the grass is brown. Must be from the pollution from Geryon’s mega-stable. How come the dryads and naiads from this area haven’t called the Camp for help? That happens a lot actually- SOS’s from abused nature spirits. A couple of weeks after the battle for Olympus, Percy and one of the Stolls (he never did get it out of the twin which one he was) took a dam off a river that had been built by vicious, hyper-intelligent beavers, which was just the kind of break from high-octane thriller and fights-to-the-death Percy needed to get his mind off the war that had just ended.  
In fact, wasn’t that just two weeks ago? Percy wishes he didn’t have the Styx’s blessing so he could check himself for the wounds that would still be healing from the encounter if it was still possible for him to be injured.   
He needs to figure out what’s going on. Thalia picked up, so maybe Annabeth will this time? He tries again and again he gets no answer. The phone doesn’t even ring. Next, he tries Nico. No answer from him either, but Percy notices a text he hasn’t opened yet. Nervous, he opens the conversation and reads through a quick passage.

Percy: what th hades is a bildungsroman  
sounds like a roman didn’t wipe  
Nico: im eating for th gods’ sake don’t b so gross  
it’s a story about coming of age like Great Expectations   
Percy: oh blank  
Nico: ?  
Percy: THANKS  
I said thanks  
Nico: u shud throw that thing away. The autocorrect is so bad  
Percy: Shabaka  
Nico: rest my case  
Percy: S H A B A K A  
Nico: jus finish ur essay

If Percy was confused before, now his brain has opened up a hatch in the back of his head and parachuted to safety before it explodes from what he has just read. Firstly, he and Nico are not friendly. They would not text and even if they were they would not be anywhere near this casual. Autocorrect? What the sweaty hell is an Autocorrect? What’s a Shabaka? What essay? Why would he ever need to know what the word ‘bildungsroman’ means? With his dyslexia, it took him about four tries to get that word read even though the writing is for some reason in Ancient Greek letters. Not only has someone made a program on this brand- this Smartphone, whatever that is- that allows demigods to write to each other in their native tongue, but they somehow figured out how to abbreviate Ancient Greek into text language? As of this moment Percy would give up the super (almost) secret location of his Achilles spot just to be told how to write ‘lol’ in Ancient Greek.  
That only made things worse. He has a feeling what he’s about to do will only make what he made worse even…worser…  
He opens a text conversation with Annabeth.

Annabeth: ready for th test?  
Percy: sure am  
was up all night boning w Frank  
Annabeth: that’s not legal in this state   
also kinda a seaweed brained thin to admit to ur gf  
percy: UP  
ALL  
NITE  
BONING UP ON MATH  
W FRANK  
NOT BONING COUSIN  
BONING UP ON MATH  
NOT COUSIN  
NASTY  
Annabeth: startin to wonder if u really have a bad autocorrect or if ur making these up 2 make me laugh  
if it’s the last one, good job bcuz we r dyin over here

“I don’t have a cousin.” says Percy, as if talking to himself will clear everything up “Mom’s an orphaned only child and Paul’s brothers don’t have kids. I don’t even know anyone named Frank.”  
He stands up on the branch (where did this impeccable balance come from?) and spreads his arms to the sky, shouting “HELLO UP THERE! IF YOU GUYS ARE GONNA MESS WITH ME THEN WHAT’S THE POINT IN GIGGLING FROM UPSTAIRS ONLY? WHY DON’T YOU COME DOWN AND GLOAT? COME ON, GODS, EVERYONE COME DOWN AND LAUGH AT THE CONFUSED MORTAL!!”  
Surprisingly, something happens.  
Not at all what Percy expects. He lowers his arms and heaves a disgusted sigh, then scoops up his bag, intending to slide down the tree and press on into whatever wilderness lies ahead until he finds someone to tell him what is going on. A dark spot on the horizon catches his eye. For a moment, he thinks it’s the smoke coming from the mega-stables. Then he realises it’s more like a stain spreading rapidly across the fields.  
“The river is chasing me.” he notes.  
He doesn’t know how he knows that either, but this is no time for asking questions. Percy moves down the tree at a speed and dexterity that he never could have managed before, especially not with a heavy backpack on him. His feet are on the ground in a matter of seconds and he’s running up the hill. His instincts are telling him to get to a higher point because he can use gravity against the attack. No, not his instincts; one of those rare, logical strains of thought that sometimes crop up in the tangle of seaweed in his head.   
Perched atop the foremost crest of the approaching waves is the naiad. Even from a quarter mile away, Percy can clearly see the radiant joy on her features. He knows almost immediately what she plans to do, and even more quickly, what he should do to stop that from happening.  
At the back of his mind, there is a memory so faint he thinks it must be something he saw in a movie, of blood dripping into a lake swirling with oil, the blood turning to the purest water as soon as it hits the lake and punching a clear spot through the oil. She wants to drown him. With the amount of poisons and impurities in that water she might manage it too. She wants to drown him and spill all the blood in his body into his waterways to clean herself up.  
He raises a hand, still holding his phone in the other, and makes a fist.  
To say the water stops in its tracks would be an understatement. It doesn’t so much stop as explode backwards. The water is blasted back as if a bomb went off in front of it, churning back towards the mega-stables like a surf charging in the wrong direction. The naiad is lost under the dark waves, although Percy can still feel her there, strangely. She cries out and the water flinches, actually flinches. She pushes back, but she has no chance of overwhelming him.  
She is out of practice when it comes to defending herself. And she is much, much weaker than him. It doesn’t matter that her river was once freshwater- Percy is over a thousand times stronger than she could ever hope to be. And now she knows that.  
The river is out of sight in a matter of seconds, but it left its shape behind it. The grass it touched looks like it was tarred, and the whole field fills up with the smell of sewage and smoke. Gagging, Percy tugs his sleeve over his mouth and retreats down the hill. A klaxon blares in the distance. Whatever he just did caught the attention of the mega-stable, which means Geryon must be on his way to investigate. Still, he must know who the intruder is. Percy has no idea what he just did, but he does know he is the only one on the planet with that unquestionable influence over water, short of Poseidon himself.  
“I don’t know what that was, but it was awesome.” he mutters to himself.  
The fields and hills unfold in front of him like a map. He can see the dark smudge of a treeline in the distance and decides that is where he should go. Demigods are never safe in forests, but it’s a dam sight easier to hide in a forest than it is to-  
The blood rushes to his head. Suddenly, he can’t think anymore, nor can he move. His legs are soggy, like pieces of spaghetti. They fold underneath him and the ground comes up to greet him.

His hands are tied.  
No, they aren’t anymore, but they were until very recently. The red marks around his wrist proves it, and the pain makes it feel as if the ropes are still there. He notes with a passing interest that three fingers from his right are gone. A hasty bandage made from a strip of purple cloth is wrapped around his injured hand, which hangs limp and useless at his side.  
“Good thing you can fight with both hands.” says Jason.  
He tugs his ripped shirt off and tosses it over his shoulder. He pulls his jacket on and zips it up to the chin, over his bare chest. Any other demigod probably would have been glad of the chance to rid themselves of their shirt in such broiling conditions, but then again, Jason is the most modest guy Percy knows. He gets embarrassed in the changing rooms to the extent that he uses a cubicle, despite the merciless teasing this prompts.  
Percy inspects the hand “Eh, it’s about time I got some kind of war-wound.”  
Jason glances down self-consciously at his stomach, although the scar he is worried about is completely covered up “Isn’t it weird how none of us got badly hurt in the war on Gaia? I mean except for me getting gutted and you almost choking to death on poison in Atlantis-”  
“While you rapped with some forgotten gods.”  
“And Leo blowing himself up and then the splinter Frank got that went septic. Do you ever worry the Fates are saving all the serious injuries for another battle?”  
Percy glances over his shoulder, searching for the enemy “Can we maybe jam about this later?”  
Jason clears his throat “Ok, rain-check on the worry-warting…I think that statue is moving.”  
He turns around to pluck his sword out of monster-ash while Percy draws Riptide with his left hand, feeling uneasy with the unfamiliar stance. It has been a long time since he fought with his left hand, so long he can’t remember.  
“Let’s go.”  
Jason takes the lead. He keeps a firm grip on Percy’s good arm to make sure they aren’t separated by one of the Labyrinth’s many tricks. It occurs to Percy how much more they have both become since their eighteenth birthdays, which were just a few months ago. Basically holding another guy’s hand would have embarrassed them both like crazy, thanks to those pesky anti-gay messages society had been burying in their subliminal since birth.  
Barriers like those have been dissolving between the group lately. The girls aren’t shy about their bodies anymore –if Annabeth sees one of the guys sitting around without a shirt, she takes it as permission and whips hers off too. Even Hazel has started to ease up a little bit. She wears the standard girl’s short-shorts on hot days (much to Nico’s dismay) and has a couple of tank-tops in her wardrobe too.   
“Speaking of Hazel,” he says, although Jason doesn’t know he was thinking about her “We’d better find her soon.”  
Jason shrugs “She’ll find us. The Labyrinth is her playground now. Besides, she can smell us, right?”  
“I think so.”  
They pass a mural depicting the trials of Hercules and Percy has to push Jason in the back to stop him from defacing the tiled face of his ancient half-brother with a permanent marker Jason carries especially for the purpose of defacing murals.  
“Head in the game.” urges Percy.  
“But he’s a dick.” insists Jason.  
“Head in the game.” 

“I’m sorry?”  
Percy jumps.  
“You want me to do what with my head?”  
Through a curtain of blinding pain, he squints up at the person speaking to him. This time, his hands really are bound. Arms too, wrenched above his head, holding him about two feet off the floor. The chains tying his wrists together are hooked on a wicked sickle-shaped thing dangling from the ceiling.  
Geryon stands on a balcony about a hundred feet over Percy’s head. He fiddles with Riptide, tracing a forefinger up and down the blade’s edge. Percy glances down at himself. He has lost his shirt, but thankfully his jeans are still on.   
“What are you doing?” another, more daring version of himself has borrowed his voice “Stripping me? Hanging me from the ceiling over a vat of….a vat of…what is that? Acid? Fat? Soap?”  
Geryon smiles “Liquid Leviathan. You are, of course, familiar with the ancient beast that terrorised the seas back when your daddy was still in charge of them?”  
He has a feeling he should be “No.”  
“Then this will be a brilliant introduction,” like every bad villain in every bad movie Percy has ever seen, Geryon starts to pace in a way he must think is threatening, and monologues for all he is worth “When a Leviathan dies, their bodies become the purest of waters. Unfortunately, the water is green so it looks absolutely putrid. The Leviathan isn’t truly dead, however, it is just waiting for a host with…”  
Blah blah blah.   
Percy’s ADHD kicks in and demands that he think about something else. For example, that dream. Was that a dream? It must have been, because the amnesia is already setting in and he can barely remember what the fuck it was he was dreaming about. Obviously he was knocked out by a wave of exhaustion from forcing the water back. That voice at the back of his head, getting louder and louder as time goes on, tells him manipulating any kind of water is as natural to him as breathing, but he hasn’t had to breathe on his own for a very long time.  
Sixty years, said the naiad.  
Did he kill her? Does he care?  
Who was that blonde guy trying to draw on Hercules? Or is it Heracles?  
“…in short, my old friend, the Leviathan will possess every inch of your body down to the smallest microbe and you will have no choice but to obey my every order.” he pauses for a deep breath, then throws his head back and lets loose a laugh so utterly villainous he must have practiced it a hundred times in the shower “You know what? I’m so happy you aren’t dead, because it gives me a chance like this. Never once in the sixty years I have been waiting for your return did I dream I’d find you napping in my own back yard, but the Fates are as kind as they are spiteful. Oh how sweet it will be to see Chase and that…that short one. What’s his face. The creepy kid.”  
“Torture porn,” suggests Percy, answering an entirely different question.  
Geryon snorts “No that’s not his name. Wait a minute…was he a girl? Tyson?”  
“I’ve walked onto the set of a torture porno.” continues Percy.  
He wonders if he can control dead Leviathan-juice. After all, it kind of looks like water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since the suggested readership was mostly in the pre-teens, Uncle Rick didn't have much of a chance to explore the adult side of the adventuring demigod world.  
> It is my firm belief that all of the boys have been suspended topless from a hook at some point in their careers. It just is.


	24. On the morning of the end of the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up: racist language. Not slurs themselves, but the language is not acceptable.

(The morning of the end of the world)

The kid must be new.  
Carter can’t remember having seen him before in any of his classes, although the kid looks to be about his age. He’s of average height, which is a head shorter than Carter so this guy either has been brought up fending off punches from a guardian or some neighbourhood kids, or he has seen the books under Carter’s arm, the glasses pushed up Carter’s nose, and decided he’s a simple nerd and therefore easy pickings, even if Carter Kane is one of the tallest boys in class and built like an athlete.  
The second piece of evidence that tells Carter this guy must have just gotten into the school today is the word he just spat in his face.  
Not the first time Carter has heard it. Won’t be the last.  
“S’cuse me?” says Carter “I’m not sure I heard you right.”  
The guy repeats it with relish “Heard it that time?”  
Carter shrugs “Ok. Nice vocabulary. Good for you.”  
He turns to walk away, but the boy weaves around him and blocks his path “Where are you from?”  
People are watching now. It’s the middle of the first recess, so most of the students are outside eating with their friends, or catching up on some homework in the library. Only the species of students his thinks of as ‘hyper-nerds’, those who stay inside to study all the time, and some of the detention crowd are around now. Neither of those groups have ever been noted for their proactive approach when it comes to lending a hand to their fellow students.  
In fact, one of the detention crowd has already whipped their phone out to record what might turn into a good fight. Carter can’t help but notice she is black. A part of him thinks ‘help a brother out’, while the larger and more rational part thinks ‘she’s trying to get a video for her YouTube that’ll go viral’. The students that watch the scene in the hall through the classroom windows and from their lockers, they’re white, black and Asian.  
Yet another clue that this guy is new: he doesn’t know how it’s done at this school. Racists, fascists, whatever- they get jumped pretty fast. There are too many religions and ethnicities at this school to say something foul without stepping hard on someone’s toes, and here, the injured parties aren’t afraid to make their frustration heard. The teachers either don’t know or turn a blind eye to it.  
Just last week, a Muslim girl had her headscarf snatched off her by some older students. Her tormenters ended up with broken toes from how hard she stamped on their feet, furrows in their cheeks and foreheads from her nails and one of them had a broken nose from when she started swinging her bag around.  
Girls can get away with that kind of stuff. Boys? It’s a lot harder with boys; the mechanics of the male world are forever being clogged by pesky things like stud-ship and machoism, neither of which Carter is particularly fond of.  
The question now is how to get away without breaking this kid in half, never mind how much he wants to.  
“I’m from New Jersey.”  
The boy’s eyes light up with a kind of greedy glee “But you’re not.”  
The soldier in Carter demands that his honour is avenged, quickly and brutally and with the curved khopesh sword (disguised as a tennis racket) in his backpack. The magician in Carter wants to change the boy into a hideous spider and crush him with his size 10 tennis shoes. But, as usual, the scholar in Carter wins, and he decides to let this worm live, just get away from him as quickly as possible and spread the word later about the racist new kid so someone else can take care of him.  
“I am,” says Carter slowly “I’ve lived there for a long time.”  
The boy shakes his head “But you’re not. Where are you really from? Which part of Africa? The West Indies?”  
It’s impressive the guy knows the names of those areas at all.  
Determined not to give an inch, Carter keeps his mouth shut. A text alert rings out from one of the classroom and a camera flashes. Nothing is private anymore, he thinks, especially not humiliation.  
The boy presses on “Must be hot wherever you came from. You’re a little burned.”  
Carter tries to get past him and is blocked again. He could knock this guy over in one swipe, but the last thing he wants to do is start a fight.  
He considers going backwards, then remembers he has come from a dead-end. Perfect. Worst to worst, he can just barge into one of the classrooms so fast the guy doesn’t have time to block him and jump out a window. They are on the second floor. A twenty or thirty foot fall. Carter has fallen much farther than that without a scrape, so he should be fine.  
For now, he decides to wait. The guy only has so much he wants to say before he loses interest.  
He continues “Especially with your shirt.” he actually tugs the sleeve of Carter’s shirt; white starched cotton “Where’s your hoodie? Where’s your baseball hat and all your bling, brother?” he makes a gangster sign “West side.”  
Something about this is kind of pathetic, like a grandpa trying to catch up on the newest slang and accidentally being offensive. The boy’s accent is thick and Southern. Carter isn’t one to get behind the stereotypes, but he could easily imagine this guy making out with a cousin in the back of a big red pick-up truck, maybe with some freshly killed deer tied to the top and a gollywog hanging above the dashboard from a little rope noose.  
Carter keeps his face carefully neutral and doesn’t reply.  
“You’re not really American. You’re more like an imported commodity. Like a VCR, you know? Nobody knows the right way to use those anymore either.” the boy’s tone is cheerful, reasonable “I’m American. Wanna know how to tell the real ones apart from the crowd?”  
Carter says nothing.  
The boy carries on as if Carter had asked eagerly “For one thing, a real American would never answer to-”  
“OI!”  
Carter’s heart and stomach do a dizzying combination where one of them sinks and the other soars with joy, recognising the rescue party, and leaves him feeling like he might vomit.   
A girl with streaks in her hair and outrageously blue eyes charges down the hallway, her bag swinging furiously behind her. She wrenches it off and tosses it to another student for safe-keeping. Carter moves to the side at the last moment, like a matador dodging a bull, and lets his little sister plough into the boy.  
The boy’s eyes are wide and scared for a second then fill up with amusement as she grabs him by the collar and shoves him against the wall.  
“Whoa there!” he holds up his hands in a gesture of mock-surrender “We’re all friends here. Me and him, we were just having a discussion. Just a friendly discussion.”  
“The fuck you were.” she snaps, her British accent making it sound more thuggish and threatening for some reason.  
The girl is named Sadie Kane. Her hair is an eye-catching arrangement of caramel (natural) and puke-green (very unnatural) today, wound up in a braid Carter did himself early this morning. Compared to some of the other girls, Sadie is pretty short, but she has muscles on her that make Carter jealous. Unlike Carter who is easily identified as mixed-race, Sadie’s skin is light and her hair is straight. She takes after their mother, whereas Carter takes after their father, both of whom are long-dead.  
Despite the more than slight resemblance between the brother and the sister, the boy has yet to recognise the sibling bond here. He seems to think he is under attack from Carter’s girlfriend- he probably wouldn’t like her either, since Zia is Arabic.  
The boy is not concerned yet “Here, why don’t you let me go. There’s nothing to see here.”  
“Kill him Sadie.” says one of the detention crowd, their phone raised.  
Another tells her what the boy called Carter and then Sadie’s temper has zoomed far past the point of no return.  
She puts her arm underneath the boy’s chin, pinning him to the wall by the throat. And horrors of horrors, she jams her knee between his legs. Every boy present, Carter included, winces and gasps and even a few of the girls move as if to over their privates. He knows from experience how much of a drive Sadie can get going behind her knee when she’s mad, or as she’d say ‘proper mad’.  
The boy’s eyes cross and faint, high-pitched noise issues from his mouth.  
Sadie comes in close “You’re new here, yeah? Real new, or you’d know this school is the kind of place where a bugger gets lynched for those kind of words.”  
“Sadie.” says Carter.  
She glances daggers at him “Shut it, brother dear, I’m teaching the wank-stain an important lesson.” The boy squeaks, terrified.  
“Do you know who I am?”  
When the boy doesn’t reply, Sadie takes him by the chin and makes him shake his head.  
She makes a pouting face “Oh really? That’s a shame. You know what? Just because you’re new, I’m going to go easy on you.”   
She drops him very suddenly. He crumples to a heap on the floor, curled around his shrivelled balls.  
Sadie plants a combat boot scuffed at the toes (from kicking demons) on his back, reminding Carter eerily of a good friend of theirs he hasn’t seem in a long time, standing over freshly fallen prey.  
“My name is Sadie Kane and the gentleman you were harassing is my brother. Yes, yes I know it’s a shock, I’m sure there aren’t many mixed-race families in the Klu Klux Klan commune or wherever it is you were raised. Now that you’re in Manhattan, you had better get used to it. If I see you messing with my brother again, or looking at him or breathing the same air as him, then…well you had better find the nearest turnip truck and get the fuck out of Dodge ‘friend’, because you don’t know what I’m going to do to you.”  
Carter takes her by the arm and gently, but firmly, pulls her off her victim. He retrieves Sadie’s bag and drags her down the hall.  
A couple of the students, mainly the girls, start to clap and Sadie bows for them.  
“Violent things!” she calls over her shoulder at the crippled racist “I’m a trained soldier! I’m a sodding war veteran! I banished the primordial darkness back to the lightless void from whence it crawled!”  
Carter covers her mouth and turns her around, steering her around the corner. Once they are out of sight, he some of the tension goes out of him.  
Then he smacks her upside the head “Sadie!”  
It was less of a slap, more of a fond cuff, but Sadie responds with a hard punch in the arm.  
“Carter!” she cries, totally livid “Why didn’t you kill the shit?”  
Rubbing his sore arm, he sighs “Because I would have literally killed him.”  
The hall is empty at the moment, so they can talk freely.  
Sadie shrugs “So what? One less racist polluting the country. We could have fed his body to Phillip.”  
She refers to their pet albino crocodile, Phillip of Macedonia. Carter occasionally teases Sadie because the shade of her skin and Phillip’s bloodless hide look the same in some lights.  
Sadie takes her bag. Her expression is thunderous “He’s a new student, you know. He’s in my class too.”  
“Poor bastard.” sighs Carter “One of these days you’re going to have to let me fight my own fights.”  
She scoffs “How was that a fight? You were standing there with this saintly look on your face like ‘yes lad that’s right, tell Uncle Carter all your worldly concerns and we’ll go burn an effigy of Obama, how dare a black man try to lead the nation’! That wasn’t fighting, that was taking it like a numpty.”  
After living most of her life in Britain, Sadie has developed a thick accent and adopted the lingo completely. Sometimes Carter has no idea what she’s saying.  
“What’s a ‘numpty’?”   
She waves a hand “That’s not important. What’s important is that the next time somebody marches up to you and tells you the South will rise again, you feed them their teeth.”  
Sadie has a temper as fiery as her preferred element in her magic, whereas Carter prefers to evaluate the situation a little more before he starts throwing his fists around. Having a war god set up shop inside your head changes you, and lucky for Carter it made him wiser. Sadie on the other…her god didn’t affect her temper very much.  
“There are other ways to get around racists than the flaming torch method.” he says.  
“I prefer the flaming torches. Gets ‘em outta the way faster.” She delves into her bag and produces two foil-wrapped bundles “Here. Charming did some baking this morning.”  
“Where is he by the way?”  
She shrugs “Said he had some godly business to attend to, so you’ll have to do him some notes for Biology.”  
Charming is Sadie’s boyfriend (whom Carter whole-heartedly approves of). His name really is Charming. It used to be a nickname, but then a lot of things happened, he became two totally different people then one different person woven from those two people, and after that it was either ‘Charming’ or ‘Waltnubis’.  
Inside the foil is a golden pastry smelling of honey. Half of the time Charming cooks, Carter has no idea what he’s eating, but it always turns out magically delicious. He wraps the pastry up again, planning to save it for lunch.  
“Bastard.” this time Sadie is deflated “Shot-gun humping, bear-fucking bastard. He’s got no right.”  
Carter pats her on the shoulder “It’s ok. I just let this kind of stuff roll off my back. Sticks and stones, right?”  
Sadie takes a furious bite of her pastry “Shaddup, words hurts. I’ve seen words kill.”  
“Those are spells. Spells are designed to hurt and kill and set stuff on fire.” he reminds her.  
“Yeah but no,” she takes another bite, moaning “Oh my gods this is brilliant. No, what I’m saying is that slurs and stuff, they’re spells too. They’re designed to hurt and drive to killings and fan the flames of race-related hate. Did you see the look on his face? Not the terrified ‘eeek my balls!’ one, the other one. He thought I was your girlfriend.”  
Carter shudders “Yeah that is pretty gross.”  
“We don’t even look like we’re dating,” insists Sadie “We look like siblings.”  
They have often been told (after the initial shock has worn off) they have the same eyes, although Sadie’s are sky-blue and Carters are a bog-standard brown. Same eyes, different colours, they say. They do share a lot of the same mannerisms and habits.   
Both dislike the colour purple and spicy foods (Sadie because she once melted a war goddess in salsa and said she couldn’t look a chili pepper in the face after it) and both have a profound fear of Nicolas Cage to the point where they refuse to watch any of his movies unarmed. Both of them like to wake up early for the sunrise and both of them have inexplicable trouble sleeping on the night of the full moon. They both prefer eating their cereal with forks and their popcorn with chopsticks, saying it will take them longer to finish one batch and prevent over-eating.  
The similarities don’t stop there, but tend to be people more concerned with the differences.  
Sadie ushers him into an empty classroom and perches on a desk. Settling opposite her, Carter stares at the sky outside.  
“Wasn’t it clear earlier?”   
Storm clouds are heavy and rumbling overhead. Something about their dark, angry colour makes Carter uneasy. It’s like they are a lid slammed down over the school and the distant city, not like a threat of a downpour.  
Sadie nods “D’you think there’s trouble?”  
He gestures to the skyscrapers on the horizon “Doesn’t it look like the clouds are sort of…”  
“Whirlpooling.” suggests Sadie.  
“That’s not a word.” it’s an unfortunate habit of Carter’s to correct his sister’s awful grammar.  
“Yeah but it’s the word for the effect.” she retorts “I’m sure Uncle Amos would have told us if he thought there was something heinous going on.”  
Carter extracts his khopesh and unsheathes it. The blade catches the weak sunlight on its wicked curve. The sword is shaped like a question mark, a traditional weapon used by the gods and acolytes alike back in the days when gods still had acolytes. It has seen more battles than Carter cares to count and never once failed him. Magic is all well and good, but Carter doesn’t like to fight without a tangible weapon that he can strap to his back or belt. More potent spells can quickly drain their caster. Sometimes a spell drains a person of every last scrap of energy and leaves them a depleted, crumpled husk.  
It’s what happened to their mother.  
“Put that away.” says Sadie.  
“Why?” he gives the sword a swing, testing the weight “It’s just a tennis racket.”  
That is true, as far as the general public is concerned.  
“You know…” he gives his sister an uncertain look “Fighting back just proves what they expect of me. To be violent and stupid. A thug.”  
Sadie’s face darkens “So? If they’re getting on your case for being black in the first place then obviously their opinions aren’t gonna be very informed. Why should you care?”  
Carter shrugs helplessly “I sorta do. I’m not a violent person.”  
She laughs “Say that without a sword in your hand and I might believe you.”  
He sets the khopesh on a desk next to him “Seriously, though. People see a young black guy and they automatically think I have a pimped-out car and a dozen bitches and my beck and call, like I’m gonna seduce their daughters and rob their sons or something.”  
Sadie nearly snorts her juice up her nose “’Bitches’,” she giggles “Sorry. Ew, look I’ve got juice all down my front.”  
The evil-eye he gives her makes her solemn again.  
“I know it’s rough. I don’t like it very much when people do that little double-take when they see me and you together as siblings, y’know? No matter how awesomely progressive people think they are, they’re always surprised.” she extends an arm and considers her pale wrist “Wish I were darker.”  
Carter frowns “Don’t be a tool Sadie.”  
“What? It’s not tool-ish to wish I looked like my brother. Fine, I wish people would stop gasping when they find out we’re related. Happy now?”  
She finishes her pastry in one bite and eyes Carter’s bag as she chews.  
He places a protective arm over the flap “No. It’s mine.”  
Lunging, Sadie pinches Carter’s flat stomach “Getting a bit flabby there!”  
He swats her away “I am not!”  
Still, he can’t help but peer down the collar of his shirt and his stomach. He has a six-pack that can only be obtained by constant sparring, training and fighting monsters. Sadie likes to break into his stuff and go through his photos, cooing over the pictures of him when he was younger (posed with various professors on various sites of archaeological importance) and at the baby-fat that has long since been stripped from his cheeks and ribs.  
Now Sadie has lifted up her own shirt to the stomach to inspect the situation. Carter turns away, but he knows that she has a perfect lady-style six-pack going for her for the same reasons. She tends to walk about in a bra and shorts on hot days.  
Sadie grabs the khopesh traces the curve with a forefinger “Hasn’t seen much action, this. Not lately.”  
Yawning, Carter leans back on the desk and stares at the clouds “Eh. I’m happy to have a break.”  
She shrugs “I don’t know. This feels more like a lull before the storm than a break to me…what was that kid’s name?”  
“Percy.”  
They’re quiet for a moment.  
“Her name was Annabeth. You don’t think they have anything to do with the storm, do you? New York belongs to their lot, after all.”  
Dread knots Carter’s stomach “I don’t…I think you’re getting worked up over nothing.”  
Sadie puffs a stray strand of hair out of her face “Am I?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Where have all the monsters gone, then?” suddenly, she is deadly serious “Normally the Nome is attacked three times a week, and you and me, we’re attacked all the time. Except we haven’t been. I haven’t seen a monster in a full week…” she crushes her fist to her mouth and watches the swirling storm “This Serapis chap is bad news. I know he’s out there, fucking around with the natural order and the gods. I just know it.”  
“I’ll tell you what’s out there. A camp of ‘half-bloods’.”  
Sadie cocks an eyebrow “I thought you said they called themselves demigods.”  
“Half-bloods too.”  
“Aaaa-wkward.” she looks at her wrist again “Do you miss Mum?”  
It’s not an unexpected question. Sadie has never shied away from the subject of their parents.  
“Yeah. Do you miss Dad?”  
“Sure. Loads. He’d tell us, though. Dad would say something if he thought there was gonna be a snake-sized problem.”  
Carter laughs “Nothing can be as problematic as a giant chaos snake Sadie. Nothing.”  
An instant later, the sky falls in.

English may have a brain roughly the size of a walnut, but she knows she is not a kite.  
She flies, she eats like a kite, she shits like a kite and she preens herself like a kite, but she is not a kite. She may have spent the majority of her lifetime wheeling in the sky and searching for tiny, tasty rodents when she is hungry, but this is not her life.   
That life is not forgotten either. The problem with living in a kite’s body is the tiny brain with which she must work. There is simply not enough room for all the memories and information from the first fifteen years of her life, when she had nails and hair instead of talons and feathers. Early on in her transformation she was faced with unique task of sorting through what she wanted to know about herself and her family for the foreseeable future. What she chose are the things she can absolutely not relinquish: her brother, her boyfriend, her parents, several very close friends, the goddess who was formerly her cat and her magic.  
The rest of it waits to be recalled: her Nome where she lived, her grandparents, the smallest battles she has fought, her friends and most of her life from Britain and a score of other trivial things that made her who she was, but had to be stored in the darkness with her magic for safe-keeping.  
She has spent the better part of half an hour mulling over a memory of her brother.  
She misses him desperately every day.  
Vomiting out of sheer misery is not something the kite body is designed to do, but she thinks if she has to go one more day without seeing or hearing from her brother she might just defy all biological logic and go ahead and do it. It’s kind of strange that a kite can experience grief in the first place.  
She hasn’t seen Carter once in twenty years, nor has she heard from him. It is necessary for their continued survival, of course, but for once Sadie would like to live. She craves a day where the warring factions of the gods would all just fuck off, so she could just hang with Carter, talk about books, read their mother’s textbook, watching a Nicolas Cage movie with their wands in hand and maybe settle down with a bowl of popcorn and a pair of chopsticks each.  
“English.”  
The woman has not moved very much this afternoon.  
She is tired, scared and a lot of other human emotions English no longer has a concept of. They had a busy afternoon, and now that the day has worn down to another night, this is the time when the woman should be less tense. She likes to read at the end of the day. She sometimes reads to English, and although English doesn’t understand it all she understands enough to get a grasp of the basic plot.  
Hope. The woman’s name is Hope. English forgets names, preferring to know someone by the way they look.  
“Do you think he’s dead?” she nods towards the bedroom door.  
Behind it, the other one is sleeping. English knows who he is from the books Hope likes to read the most, aloud and to herself, but she has forgotten his name in favour of remembering how he looks. When Hope put him in her bed, he was very pale and sickly-looking. The predator in English stirred and wondered if she could pick him off easily- how long he would take to eat.  
There’s not that much of him. He’s short for a human of his gender and age. Hope will tower over him if he ever gets back on his feet.  
“I hope he’s not dead.” continues Hope “That would suck very badly, if I killed one of the lost heroes.”  
English pulls her head out from under her wing. She blinks at Hope.  
Yes, it would be pretty bad if the other one died. They’d have to throw his body out to the other ones that prowl around their tower before his body got up on its own. One of the first things she noticed about him was how he smelled, not unpleasantly, of death. He wore it like a polite suggestion, not like the heavy, nasty way the other ones wear it. She was reminded painfully of someone she loves very much, whom she hasn’t seen for twenty five years.  
Survival in the Lookouts is a waiting game.   
Plenty of time to grow lonely, although the kite part of her doesn’t really allow her to feel loneliness. More like a keen sense of loss: someone is not here, they should be.  
But Hope is very lonely. It’s why she talks to English.  
She still is: “So I guess this means the world is going to be saved or ended for good. Should I call up RED? I mean I know the siege is still going on in full-swing and they’ve had to cut off a lot of their communication routes because they’re losing ground and their secrets are being discovered.”  
English scratches an itch on her breast with her beak.  
“I wonder if they could even do anything if I told them he was here?” Hope sits on the sagging couch and twirls a lock of her fine, sandy hair around a finger “They don’t have much in the way of activists left. I guess they’d dispatch a veteran from the Camps, since he’s so important. There’s not very many of those left either…he could do it himself. He could take himself to RED. He’s pretty strong, right? Almost as awesome as Percy.”  
English couldn’t be less interested in the one-conversation if she tried.  
“Yeah. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll take him to the headquarters in New York. Most of the veterans from the Camps live there. He’ll need my help, won’t he? The world he left isn’t the one he’s coming back to.”  
Hope smiles.  
“What do you think about this, English? We have one of the lost heroes asleep in my bedroom. Shit, fuck do I hope he’s not dead.”  
English knows the other one isn’t dead, he just doesn’t happen to be in his own body at the moment. She hasn’t had one of her wandering dreams in a long time, but she knows that kind of dream when she sees it.   
The other one is looking for his friends while he sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So these are the Kanes, Carter and Sadie.  
> I know not very many of us have read the Egyptian counterpart to Heroes of Olympus, but I read them alongside the other series and I can't recommend them enough. It's the same blend of satire and action that made us love Percy Jackson. The cast of characters are up to the quality we expect from Uncle Rick, and while the Egyptian mythology is somewhat harder to get a grasp on, it is still brilliantly used and delivered.  
> And contrary to what seems to be a popular belief, Anubis is not Nico copy and pasted. He's much more cheerful.


	25. A couple of flashbacks over Percy's fanfiction of his own life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHEW  
> Sorry about that delay, people. Just started a new school, new country, new bunch of people to get to know and the whole International Baccalaureate in front of me. Chapters will be coming, but possibly slower owing to me trying to learn Spanish for school.  
> I also apologise for the lack of italics where languages other than English are written, ut I can't find out how to do italics on this website.

When Reyna arrives at the front hall, the barricades have already been removed from the doors and shove to either side of the room. For half a year now, there has been a giant pile of crates, furniture, stones and even the rusted shell of a tank from the American military’s brief counter-strike which was decomposing in one of the back rooms until Orion and some others shoved it in front of the doors.   
The attack came suddenly and quickly.  
Reyna had just taken up the position of the First Lt the week earlier. None of the Hunters were aware of the arrangement between her predecessor and a monster army that was camping in the city. The other Lt, a girl called Irie Jones from Artemis’s pre-war entourage, had been paying the monsters to steer clear of the Hunter compound with either one of the sicker Gee-gees, or a Hunter who seemed to be nearing the end of their rope. They were losing people left and right those days, when it was still possible to go outside and the Hunters insisted mounting attack after attack on Mt Tam. There were so many ways to disappear it was no wonder she had gone on for so long undetected. She had been paying them a kind of protection money, one of their numbers, once a month for the last two years.   
When Reyna refused to continue this practice, they were attacked.  
First, the barricade went up. Then Britomartis set up her nets, which took her a week to do and sent her into a week-long coma, and since then the Hunters have been trapped in their compound, awaiting a rescue from RED (who are still trapped) or whoever else wanted to take a shot at freeing them. There hadn’t been a single rescue attempt and Reyna was beginning to think she might be buried in the compound. She had her dream just as the situation seemed at its most desperate.  
And now the army is gone and Leo is back.  
Many of her Hunters grin at her as they pass, elated with the sudden turn of events. The doors are open and there are a great many people taking advantage of this. She doesn’t see any Gee-gees yet, but they’re probably still hiding. The clean-up crew sure are enjoying themselves. They’re throwing monster-dust up in the air and making dust-angels and pelting each other with it – acting like a pack of teenagers, which is what they all are.  
She spots Leo sitting on a crate near the doors. He is talking very earnestly with one of the few male Hunters, who seems to be explaining the siege situation.  
As she draws closer, she can hear them talking “...all the rations we needed because Hunters like to hoard dried stuff so we can spend more time hunting for monsters than for food, but we just didn’t have the firepower to take them out ourselves. All we could do was defend, defend, defend and pray that someone would come along.”  
Leo catches Reyna’s eyes over the Hunter’s shoulder and she can’t help but be alarmed by how shocked he looks. She has seen the symptoms of shock plenty of times before in the compound. Too much trauma at once can send the body into a sort of panic mode where it starts to shut itself down. But Leo can’t die, she reminds herself, he literally cannot die.  
Officially, the crew of the Argo II has decided it must be a side-effect of whatever it was that he took from that doctor guy that allowed him to come back after he blew Gaia to kingdom come. Shortly after he returned, there was an accident on the archery range and he ended up being shot in the shoulder. A wound like that is like a mosquito sting to most demigods, so they weren’t too concerned.  
Jason was all set to hold Leo down and cut the arrow out, but before he could Leo tugged it out of his shoulder (bad mistake: it has gone right through, he could have caused some serious nerve damage) and pointed out that his wound was healing itself. And it was. It seared itself shut in a matter of moments, leaving no sign that there had been a wound at all except for the blood on Leo’s shirt. He was regenerating.  
After conferring for a little while, Hazel and Nico announced that they had figured Leo would have something like this going for him if he did manage to come back from the dead. Hazel called it a kind of curse. Leo told them to prove it. Nico ran him through.  
“Really?” Leo had seemed fine despite the sword in his stomach “Was that really fucking necessary?”  
“You’re fine.” Nico had pointed out.  
“So I guess you can’t die now.” said Hazel.  
“This still hurts. Like, a lot.” he tugged the sword out and handed it back to Nico, holding his guts in with his free hand “Jesus Gods, Jason, how do you put up with this?”  
He was healed completely in ten minutes and evidently felt pretty good, because he spared neither time nor effort in the counter-attack on his smaller tormenter with a spanner.  
Deathless or not, Leo looks like he could use a hug and a sharp slap. Reyna has been looking forward to giving him both.  
At her approach, the Hunter (either Sven or Kristofferson- they’re both so blond and Nordic she can’t tell them apart) straightens up and salutes to Reyna and Leo.  
“Thank you.” he says earnestly “Very much.”  
He heads out of the doors and immediately face-plants into the dust and makes an angel.  
“That hurt.” mutters Leo.  
She pats him (her?) on the shoulder “He’s just in awe.”  
“No, not him,” Leo blinks with wide blue eyes “I mean the fire. That hurt to do.” he holds up a shaking hand (unblemished by his years in the forge, as if he has never picked up a screwdriver before) and shows Reyna it is trembling “It’s never hurt before. I’ve never been that hot before.”  
Reyna supresses a giggle.  
He shoots her a dirty glance “Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean I’ve never been that intensely hot so quick…I wasn’t up there for more than two or three minutes, but it was like I had been burning for hours.”  
She motions for him to follow her “Let’s talk about this somewhere more private.”  
He glances towards the Hunters streaming in and out of the compound “Shouldn’t you be leading or something?”  
“They know what to do. I’ll worry about them later.”  
She guides him through several over-flowing corridors, deep into the shabby heart of the complex. The ragged crowds part for Reyna with the usual assortment of hasty salutes and whispers, and a couple of curious glances at Leo. After half a year in here, everyone knows everyone at least on sight and a new face will not go unnoticed. However, they don’t know to identify him (her) as the one who torched the army because all they saw was a brilliant streak of fire carving through the ranks, not this pale, blonde girl trailing behind the Lieutenant, moving as hesitantly as if she were unsure of how to use her own legs.  
She definitely has no idea what to make of of the crowds of Gee-gees and late Hunters flowing towards the main gates. She watches them with the same glazed curiosity the generations of the older worlds would have reserved for news stories about distant wars. Eventually, she hooks a finger around Reyna’s belt and drops her eyes to the ground, following her in silence.

“What happened?”  
Owing to his new form, which Rena noticed was curvy and pleasantly flat simultaneously, he fills out a set of Reyna’s old clothes pretty well. His breasts are small and his butt is not. Nothing will teach you to forget everything you thought you knew about the lines of gender and gender identity and how well-defined they are like a career as a demigod, especially if you happen to be in charge of a squad of immortal celibates, but Reyna can’t deny that it is weird to meet her a friend who was perfectly happy being a guy in an entirely different female body.  
Really, really weird.  
She is still thinking this when Leo asks his question, so he has to ask it a couple more times before Reyna answers.  
“You mean to the world?”  
He sits on the sagging couch pushed to the far wall of her office, where Reyna spends two out of seven nights a week so she doesn’t wake up too far from her work. After he put on the proffered sweatpants and low-cut pyjama shirt, even the spare underwear and the binder Reyna uses when her old sports bra simply will not keep her from springing all over the place inside her armour, he wrapped himself up in the blanket again.  
Reyna can already see Leo doing that thing that he does: retreating to a safe distance, observing the situation, getting ready to come back and be totally informed and savvy and all that shit. She just hasn’t seen him retreat so far in a long time.  
“Yeah…it looked like the apocalypse out there.” he speaks quietly.  
Reyna has long since the energy to treat the war with tact “Yep. It came, it saw, it conquered. We’re all living under the Green Thumb now.”  
She has also forgotten how to talk about this, the war, her personal tragedies. Reyna is so out of practice when it comes to grieving, properly, with time put aside for it, she doesn’t think she can cry out of sadness anymore.  
“Green Thumb?”  
“That’s what we call her regime. We call the goddess herself the Dirty Bitch.”  
Something flits across Leo’s face, the first time Reyna has seen his face anything but blank.  
“That stuck, huh?” he says.  
“A lot of stuff stuck,” she pauses to search in the top drawer of her desk and produces a battered book with a blank black cover, which she tosses to him “This is ‘House of Hades’.”  
Catching it, he looks at her quizzically “What is this?”  
She smiles softly “Remember how Percy was going to write these?”  
Now he smiles too “Yeah. Of course. I just finished reading the draft of the first one last week.”  
Digging even deeper under a pile of files and other junk, she finds a dog-eared copy of said draft “The finished product is even better.”  
He shakes his head in wonderment “This stuff happened near the end of the war.”  
“Round One.” adds Reyna “There are books all the way through Percy’s first prophecy, then almost to the end of ours.”  
“How far in?”  
She gestures to the book in his hands “That’s the last one.”  
“And these are…these are what?” he crosses his leg and flips through the pages “Did Percy write these? This all sounds like his style.”  
“Most of that is Seaweed Brain’s original stuff,” saying that nickname is like tasting a type of candy she forgot she liked “The stuff he did when he was obviously half-asleep was tweaked.”  
“By who? How many of these books are there?”  
“There are nine altogether, a couple of short stories, and that one thing Percy made us swear we would never let him publish.”  
Leo laughs “His handbook to the gods, right? A scorching tell-all account of the gods’ greatest hits?” it may be a different voice, but it is still his laugh that comes out “I thought he ripped that manuscript up and put the pieces in Imagine’s and Mrs O’Leary’s food.”  
Reyna shakes her head “Annabeth gave me a spare copy for safe-keeping, the one that Rachel illustrated.”  
“Of course!” Leo slaps the cover of the book “Of course it was Rachel! Wow, she writes as good as she draws…please tell me she wrote that thing about Khione out.”  
“Which thing? The battle?”  
He starts to squirm “You know which one I mean, you bruja, just tell me.”  
She nods “She had to edit out quite a bit to make it accessible to all ages.”  
That is clearly a load off his mind “Ok, so Leo Valdez’s great shame shall forever remain a secret.”  
“Except to those of us who were there.”  
He snaps his fingers at her “Nobody was there. It never happened.”  
It’s so weird to see a Leo-ish gesture coming from a white girl that Reyna has to laugh “Ok, it never happened.”  
His smile fades a little “Ok. So what happened to Rachel? She was clearly around for a while after…”  
“The sky fell in.”  
“That. So is she still alive?”  
Reyna bites her lip, and if she had a window in her office she would stare out it now to avoid making eye-contact with Leo “It’s debatable.”  
He sits upright as if an electric current has passed through him “Did she turn into one of those weird hippy-mummy things?”  
“Maybe. If she had, it would have been in the last year. I haven’t seen or heard from her in a long time.”  
“Aren’t you guys…you know.”  
A familiar wave of resentment washes through Reyna, directed towards Rachel, fickle sexualities and generally extended to the world at large full of all those happy couples. It’s refreshing. She can’t remember the last time she was pissed off about being single “She has a son now.”  
He reacts as if he was hit in the back of the head with a mallet “With who?!”  
“No one you know…there are things you have to know, Leo.”  
He spreads his hands, inviting her tale of the end of the world in for a hug “Obviously. I just burned a cohort of free-range monsters to dust outside of the ruins of whatever city that was. There are some stories to tell.”  
So she tells him.

(April 2017, Camp Halfblood)  
Mr D caught the sky at the last second.  
There is no other way to describe it, other than that he simply lifted his arms as he stood atop the highest point at Camp Half-blood, the hill that over-looked the valley, and caught the sky as it rushed to meet the ground. Most of the campers are too busy picking themselves up off the ground, taking stock of who was still conscious and rushing to the aid of Mr D (nothing could be done, so they stood and stared instead, their heads scraping the belly of the sky, thinking the god had never looked more godly than he did at that moment, crouched under the swirling grey column where the earth and the sky were determined to meet), so it hadn’t really occurred to anyone to go and check on Thalia’s tree, the Golden Fleece flung over its lowest branch or the dragon that guarded it.  
Clarisse LaRue (the one who will go onto tell Reyna the story) stares up at the blanket of blue sagging over her head, while Travis Stoll rubs the arm that she punched to get his attention. It hurts. That’s all he trusts himself to think about- how much it hurts, not about anything else at all, lest his brain explode from trying to process it.  
“Are you seeing this?” she jabs a finger at the clouds “What the fuck are those symbols?”  
Symbols stranger than even the most obscure Ancient Greek letter dart in and out of the too-dark clouds, travelling in flocks or on their own, spitting trails of multi-coloured sparks and glowing hideous colours.  
“I don’t know.” says Travis, also deciding he doesn’t want to know.  
“Hieroglyphs,” says Will Solace “Like the stuff they put on those dead guys’ coffins. Sour-cough or whatever.”  
“Sarcophagi.” says Drew Tanaka.  
“Where did Leo go? Wasn’t he headed this way?” asks Jake Mason, a panic in his eyes “I need to talk to him! Something really bad just happened to Jason!”  
“He disappeared.” suggests Drew flatly.  
“Into the ground.” Will mimes the action of pulling “Creepy white hand, probably Nico and Hazel’s scary-ass dad.”  
“Fuck, Clarisse, that really hurts.” says Travis.  
Jake is ready to fly into a full-on demigod-style panic, his knife already drawn “You mean the same thing happened to Leo?”  
All four of the demigods point to the withered circle of grass.  
“I hope he doesn’t swallow dirt,” Will grows thoughtful “All those pathogens and microbes and blah blah blah…”  
Clarisse hasn’t got the time or the reason to listen to another one of Will’s health-related monologues (which tend to culminate in an offer for unnecessary surgery), so she turns her back on him and the scorched grass and sprints in the direction of her cabin. They know to gather there in times of emergency to receive their orders, unless engaged in battle or defence.   
Her heart pounds in her chest. At times like these, an odd mix of toxic emotion overcomes her, a kind of irrational fear blended with a fever dream she had shortly after the Battle for Manhattan, almost five years ago now. Silena Beauregard, a friend turned traitor turned last-minute hero who Clarisse still thinks about when there is nothing else to occupy her mind. In her dream, Silena sneaked up behind her while she gave out the orders in the heat of the battle, alongside Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase, so perfectly preserved in her mind it must be a snapshot of memory from the real battle. Silena’s hand slides through her chest, cold and burning at the same time, her hand clutches her heart and she starts to squeeze Clarisse’s heart so that it pumps wildly, like an animal kicking inside a trap, and the fear is overwhelming.  
The feeling comes back to her in battle sometimes. Or sometimes, just when she’s tying her shoelace, the fear and the loss will bowl her over all at once and she will thank the gods (her father not included) she has forgotten how to cry out of fear.  
“Clarisse!” her sister Sita draws level with her, matching her pace in laboured strides “You have to come! Thalia’s tree!” she manages.  
That is all Clarisse needs to hear “Tell the others to come to Thalia’s tree.”  
In under a minute, Clarisse has covered the quarter mile distance to the hill where the tree grows. The ichor in her blood has never run closer to the surface, as if it senses something terrible coming. Worse than the second Titanomachy and worse than the war against Gaia.  
And all it takes is a single look at the hill where Thalia’s tree grows to convince Clarisse LaRue that this is absolutely true.  
She can only watch in disbelief as a lion that makes the Nemean look like a kitten with fur so golden it hurts to look at stretches its jaws open (Megladon, she thinks, look no further Shark Week), leans through the space where the barrier should be, and devours the tree, the hissing Peleus and the Golden Fleece in one small bite.

(October 2019, Tokyo)  
Reyna’s nineteenth birthday comes and goes inside the darkness of the subway tunnels. It has been two years since she last saw him, but she still thinks about how nice (truly miraculous in fact) it would be if Frank were here too. Granted, he would be crouching in the blackness without so much as a candle to light his way for fear of waking the monsters crashing around in the distance, waiting for a rescue from one of the most unreliable demigods on the face of the Dirty Bitch (unless he smells blood, fucking forget it, Will Solace has better stuff to go at with his scalpel), but it would mean the world if they could share one more birthday.  
Reyna and Frank found out they shared the unusual birthday of October 31st in the weeks following what has now come to be called Round One. As she moves carefully through the tunnel, feeling her way with measured steps and a staff that was supporting a broken leg until last week, she remembers Frank telling her awkwardly about how he was never allowed to do a Halloween in his childhood. His grandmother expressly forbid it, asserting that while she might be as Canadian as the roaming moose and snowstorms in April, she was still Chinese enough to know that children who dressed up as ghosts and goblins for candy were just begging for trouble from the real stuff.  
She wishes more than anything she was back in the praetors’ office at Camp Jupiter, dressed in sloppy pyjamas and sharing a bag of candy corn with him while some busty chicks were slaughtered on the TV by a masked killer.   
Without realising it, she has begun to pray again. She doesn’t know who to. Bellona has never been the most responsive mother, as you expect from a god, and she is rarely struck by the urge to appeal any kind of other higher power. Not even when the Egyptians were revealed to the world did she feel the need to pray for safety or cooperation between the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. The first would be a ridiculous request, and the second? Well, anyone who doesn’t want to spend the remainder of their eternity sandwiched under the Green thumb is on the same side. The background, ethnicity, gender and the sexuality, all are totally irrelevant now. There are only two things people call themselves nowadays.   
‘Loyal’ or ‘rebel’.

(January 2023, Dresden)  
The city is on fire.  
Jake wonders if he should feel some kind of sadness. After all, an upwards of ten thousand people are going to perish in that fire. Those that will survive have already stumbled to the top of the hill, their clothes smoking and their lungs roasting from the smoke they have inhaled. Some of them react to the red emblem on his uniform. The red silhouette of a pine tree has become famous across the DB. Wearing it can be both a death sentence and the only thing standing in the way of exactly that. But they ignore them, choosing to be distraught over the loss of their homes instead.  
Jake has stopped feeling things the way he should. He found that on-the-spot reactions took up much more energy than he could spare, so he packs away the terror and the carnage to weep over at a later date, when he is safer. To him at the moment, the fires are no more than the source of an unpleasant, blisteringly hot wind and embers he must occasionally slap off his jacket. He has seen more impressive fires before, fires which burned cold and froze grown men to brittle ice in seconds, fires in which demons swam and played and fires that poured into the deepest crevice of Tartarus, perhaps even drenching the eponymous god at the very bottom.  
This fire? It’s burning a couple thousand human and otherwise refugees to cinders. For the next day the German countryside will turn grey with their ash, reek with their cooked-meat smell. He has seen worse. After Camp Half-blood, he will have always seen worse.  
Faintly, he is also thinking about what kind of whim it was that struck Gaia so that she decided she needed to swat a city off the map. Usually, she leaves cities. Sure, she’ll ban the use of cars and other polluting personal devices, leaving them with only the necessities (no wi-fi, unfortunately). She could mean to turn every city and town and modern convenience to rubble, forcing the humans to resort to medieval methods, now that he thinks about it. What does she need the cities for, after all? When they are destroyed, a slum is hastily erected in its place, with substantially less troublesome humans or appliances for the DB to worry about.  
This could be the beginning of some kind of extermination policy. Not that Jake really cares. Worrying about the defences of cities against Gaia isn’t his department- picking up the human trash that scrambles out of the wreckage is.  
After about two hours of watching the town burn from the hillside, he decides the stragglers of the survivors are done for anyway. Brushing the grass from his slacks, he stands up and addresses the dusty crowd. He has to shout over the roar of the flames, but there is only a handful, maybe thirty or forty, so his voice doesn’t have to carry too far.  
“Come with me.” he says in German “There’s a safe place nearby.”  
“Why should we believe you?” snaps a child.  
Now that he really looks, most of the crowd can’t be too far into their teens.   
He shrugs “Don’t have to. But the alternative is that.” he points to the fire.  
When he turns towards the forest, they follow him, putting their backs to the second great fire in Dresden. This is the one that will finish it off.

(2030)

Khione controls the winter.  
Sometimes, she holds the other three seasons hostage if she wants more land or longer months in some part of the world. Gaia encourages the other wind spirit and gods to indulge her. Extreme conditions remind her of the old days, she says. However Khione is strictly limited to the areas she is able to scorch with permafrost. While Gaia condones the torture of fools who are either dumb enough to stay in greater Eurasia or Canada or trapped, she doesn’t want Khione eradicating her rich variety of habitats under a blanket of snow. The same goes for Oceanus, Nepthys, Sobek and Aigaios and the rest of them. They were only allowed to flood Indonesia and the parts of Australian coast that were especially built up. Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea and Surfer’s Paradise may be as lost to the ages as the fabled Atlantis, but Madagascar and the Cook Islands are supposed to be very nice in the spring.

(September 2040, the outskirts of the New Athens settlement in the former ruins of New York)  
Travis sees the first dinosaurs.  
His twin girls cling to his legs as they watch the towering diplodocus waddle across the field, aiming for a tree towards the centre where a tall tree is growing.  
The girls are seven years old. The beast could be anywhere near as young as them- Travis has never seen one before. He was there to see the first zombies climb from the earth. He built the first fences with the Hunters and worked with a hunting goddess named Neith who wore a cloak of pockets to perfect the head-splitting technique. He was something of a legend among the zombie killers for a while, romanticised for his frozen age (eighteen) and the way he look fiercely handsome with a machete held at the right angle.  
A close encounter cost him a hand and although some of his contemporaries fought without a leg or an arm, he decided that was enough for him. His work for RED is all information based now, done from the home so he can supervise the girls while his wife strategically rampages. Travis is now twenty seven years old, looks much younger than his age thanks to his demigod blood, a father of two and seeing possibly the scariest thing in his life since the younger one, Connie, coughed up blood when she was four (as it turned out she just bit her tongue very hard).  
“What’s that?” asks the older one, Silena.  
She vibrates with nervous energy. Connie is much quieter, more introspective, preferring to keep her comments to herself unless she has learned a new swear word.  
“Dinosaurs.” says Travis “They used to have their bones in museums when I was a kid.”  
“So they’re old.” surmises Connie “Old as the DB?”  
“Maybe,” he tracks the distant dinosaur’s progress through the park “They were definitely one of Gaia’s first batch of children…there’s an old legend-”  
“Her ugly babies went to hell.” says Silena.  
Tartarus is getting all kinds of new names these days- Hell and Jahannam being the most popular. Travis has made sure the kids know their history, the world’s history and the best of the stories about their possibly dead grandfather.  
“No, not that one.” he points to the long-necked animal “They used to say Gaia had a crack at making dragons, but dragons back then are a whole lot different from dragons now.”  
As if to prove the point, the diplodocus pauses elegantly and sneezes a jet of flame. Finally, it reaches the tree, the tallest one in Central Park where a Titan was once imprisoned, and takes a dainty nibble at the leaves on the upper branches.  
Silena tugs at Travis’s jeans “How come you can’t do that? How come you don’t have special powers? Momma can punch a hole in a grown monster.”  
“Yes she can.” says a voice behind her “I’ll give that thing a hard smack between the eyes if it comes anywhere near my girls.”  
Relinquishing her grasp on her father’s jeans, Silena spreads her arms, giving her mother permission to pick her up. Connie offers her hand for the customary high-five she and her mother have greeted each other with since Connie was old enough to make the gesture.  
Travis makes room for her on the balcony “I don’t think it’s gonna be malicious.”  
Clarisse snorts “Yeah, that’s what they said about the free-range ventii. Now every time it rains, the wind blows so hard it can cut you.”  
“Which is why we have metal umbrellas now.” points out Travis civilly “I’m not going to stop taking my walks in Central Park. If the authorities are letting it wander through the city, it’s not a threat to us.”  
“Unless it’s an extermination technique.” Clarisse bounces Silena on her hip and picks a piece of stray fluff off a narrow shoulder “We may be in cities now (or well-constructed slums with running water and random bursts of electricity through the mains), but that’s only because they can keep a close eye on us.”  
“Fuckers.” suggests Connie.  
“Language.” says Travis automatically.  
The dinosaur munches away at the tree with a placid expression.  
“We should call Rachel.” says Travis “She’ll want to know. You and I both know the DB isn’t spitting up dinosaurs for the fun of it. Imagine the damage they’re going to do, Reese (a pet name he hasn’t used since the days of their secretive affair in their Hunter days), because it’s not just going to be herbivores. We’re going to have T-Rex and raptors up to our ears, and that’s why I intend to take my morning constitutional until I can’t venture outside without a bronze bolt modified for dino-destruction.”  
The family pass a nice evening watching the dinosaur eat from the safety of their balcony.

(2055)  
It is Hades’ job to be around.  
To clean up a blood-spill here, to answer the door or usher out a visiting loyalist there, maybe bring his master up a drink if he plans to spend the night in there working. Hade is well aware he is a novelty in the household, as well as a servant. Sometimes he wonders if Eurymendon allows him to wear what he pleases, or in other words, to dress like a rebellious teenager going through an ‘emo’ phase, because the King of the Gigante fancies him. If this were true, he would have probably tried to force himself on Hades earlier. There’s always the chance that he is afraid of him- Hades may not be anywhere near full power as himself or as Pluto, but he can still put the fear of the gods in anyone if he wants to.  
It is also equally possible that Eurymendon is afraid of the consequences he might suffer at the hands of Persephone. Since Gaia’s rise, the gods have become a fact of life and all of that belief has boosted every god’s powers to heights even greater than what they once had in the old countries. Most have hidden their essence away for fear of having it stolen, like Hades. But unlike Hades, Persephone doesn’t need to fear anyone or anything as long as Demeter stays in power. If Demeter remains in charge of the harvest, Persephone is untouchable.  
She has also become terrifying in her own right. Like all the gods whose powers come from nature in some way, Persephone’s power has grown by the tenfold now that the earth is awake. She may be working as Eurymendon’s gardener (a ploy to stay with her husband, although she could be living with Demeter in a palace), but her employer is well aware that his gardener doesn’t need to hesitate to make her displeasure known.  
Hades is around to show-off Eurymendon’s status to the other gods, but Persephone is something he just can’t get rid of.  
That makes her position as a RED informant all the more valuable. It means, when the rare urge does strike, Hades still has a reason to smile.

(July 2076)  
Winter rolled in without warning, as it is prone to doing.  
At first no one saw fit to raise the alarm. The RED base is buried in the face of a mountain, making it strategically immune to most attacks and through a series of underground tunnels, an easy place to leave in the unlikely event of a siege. These are just precautions. Very few people have the faintest idea where the RED base is actually located. Most of the informants who live or work there are transported through a secret network in the new teleportation technology, so they have never had to make the physical journey to the base. Those who leave the base see an icy forest that could belong to any cold place, from Svalbard to Antarctica. The only ones who know where the base are would never go outside. They are among the most wanted people still walking on the face of the DB, and to catch them would be like catching a genuine Sasquatch in the old world.   
RED had grown a little soft at the base, believing they were safe. For twenty years, they were arguably the only safe place a demigod, legacy or a nature spirit or god with rebellious tendencies could be.   
So it is not necessarily the fault of the population of the base that they didn’t notice the storm brewing outside their gates, nor that the density of the undead in the escape tunnels was much less manageable than the normal volumes. Fortunately, the base was designed to withstand exactly the kind of siege they found themselves under when the storm parted to reveal Khione in the centre of it.  
The communications were cut off. The supply trains were told to stay away at all costs. Informants everywhere were suddenly left on their own, with no reliable intel, protection or even supplies, and so finally the thorn in Gaia’s side seemed to be close to falling out.  
This is about where Leo came in.

(2077 April)  
“So what do you want me to do?”  
Reyna shrugs “There was a mission. Before the siege began there was a plan to go into the Underworld to shut-”  
“The Doors of Death?” suggests Leo testily.  
She grimaces “Yeah.”  
Leo’s shoulders slump, but he smiles anyway “Alright. Sounds fun. So many people have told me to go to hell over the years, I might as well see what all the fuss is about.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part of the story is drawing to a close. This one was all about setting up the world whereas the second of the series will be about the action, taking stuff down, reuniting, demigod shenanigans and a whole lot of flooding thanks to Percy.  
> Also that was like nine pages, so wow, my fingers hurt.


	26. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was pretty much setting the scene, introducing the characters and the state of the world.  
> The next one will be much tighter, more action-packed and hopefully the kids won't be kept away from each other for so long this time.

Annabeth is thinking about sleep.  
Not the thing itself, but rather what her friends looked like when they slept. She can’t stop thinking about it, and with the entire day in front of her until Yuri dares to take her up the outpost where this Cyrus worked, she has to think about something.  
So she thinks about what she has apparently been doing for sixty years. She remembers no dreams, not even the faint trace of dreams that cling to the mind even in the waking world. If her brain wasn’t focussed on keeping her neurons active with dreams, then what has she been doing for the past sixty years? Lying as if dead? Coming out of the pond, it was all so confusing and sudden. One moment she wasn’t there at all, then the next she was tearing out of the water into the violent cold, and the next she was being carried on a stranger’s back, wrapped in his coat, wondering where her world had gone.   
Annabeth lies on her back in one of the upper-rooms. She twirls a knife around her fingers- a crude but effective knife fashioned from a drakon tooth in a similar way that her sword was made from a drakon spine. Remarkably, her ADHD isn’t bothering her too much. It sleeps towards the back of her head, fidgeting occasionally, making her jump to her feet and pace the room a couple of times, her mind wander. But ultimately, it comes back to the same topic and she settles on the same part of the floor again.  
So, sleeping.  
Percy does a lot of that.   
Back when he had the Styx blessing, he needed a power nap about fifteen minutes long as much as three times a day. He is what Annabeth thinks of as a ‘talented sleeper’; he can lie down anywhere and get a satisfying nap, then hop back up and be ready for action. Annabeth knows that although he will lie as still as a corpse during his naps, he kicks and moans and chats for all he’s worth during the night. She has carried out full conversations with him while fighting for the blankets (“You just pulled them off my feet,” “You don’t have feet,” “Uh, yes I do,” “No you don’t. You’re a fish. You have fins,”), and he even sleep-walks. He would end up in the weirdest places, like floating face-down in the lake or inexplicably getting through a locked door and a couple of protective spells to arrive at the foot of Jason’s bed, where he would sway until he either got in bed with Jason or was steered back towards his own bed.  
Annabeth rolls onto her stomach. The floorboards are rough. Without really thinking about it, she pushes the tip of her knife into the wood and rolls the hilt between her palms.  
Piper can toss and turn for half of the night. She will stare at the ceiling, hide her face under a pillow or read a book with a penlight until sleep finally finds her. She lies at funny angles, arms thrown this way and legs folded that, like the victim of a car crash. Thankfully, she is a quiet sleeper.  
Hazel and Reyna are too. Hazel sleeps straight as a plank with her arms folded on her stomach, arranged like a classic vampire bride. Reyna prefers a position that makes it look she is about to do a cannonball. Finding her knotted up at the bottom of her comforter is common. A long spray of black hair often sticks out of the blankets, so Annabeth thinks of Reyna as a kind of carrot that must be unearthed from the sheets.  
Reyna was listed in the Manifesto, about mid-way through the list of criminals who have been wanted for a long time. One Ramirez-Arellano, responsible for the death of several higher-ups, the sabotage of a score of ships in Gaia’s fleet and often found working in conjunction with the rebel group known as the ‘Hunters’. The passage made Annabeth laugh.  
The knife has begun to bore a hole in the floorboards. Shavings of wood curl away from the knife tip. Annabeth watches the progress with a detached interest.  
For the first few months she was around him, Annabeth didn’t think Nico actually needed to sleep unless he was passing out from the exertion of some zombie flinging. She noticed he would go missing in the early mornings, but she put that down to him just not wanting to be around. Then Nico started to get more comfortable around the group and to act more like his human half. When he needs to sleep, there’s not much he can do about it except for find a soft place and curl up, which he actually does, exactly like a little black kitten, giving rise to the moniker ‘Death Kitten’ he is still hopefully unaware of. Sometimes, he drops off on her shoulder and she will find it hard to believe she was ever afraid of him.  
Frank sleeps in instalments of seven hours even. Usually, he sleeps in the form of a bulldog but every now and then he chooses something more exotic. Once on a mission, he turned into one of those long, wingless Chinese dragons Annabeth didn’t know were real and wrapped himself around Festus’s steaming bulk.   
Faintly, she is aware that the hole has become part of a larger doodle the knife is carving into the floorboards. She doesn’t bother to stop herself, curious to see what it will end up as.  
Finally, there’s Leo who refuses to fall asleep around other people for the most part. His crew is an exception of course, but Leo would rather go loopy with sleep-deprivation than let himself fall asleep around other people. He sleeps with a knife under his pillow. Annabeth doesn’t need to ask why. She does the same thing. She also wakes up with the same jolt, the same stab of panic as she tries to figure out where she is (home? Streets? Tartarus? Argo the Sequel?) and so does Thalia. So did Luke. Funnily enough, Nico doesn’t seem to have that problem. Maybe the various dangers that harassed the other homeless kids had the good sense to stay away from the small boy who literally sweated the presence of death?  
Finally, she lifts her knife from the floor, conscious of the mess she has made.  
Annabeth has carved a rough sketch of the Argo II into the floor. Her drawing skills plateaued around her fifth birthday, but the basic shape and design is right. The huge mast topped with the crow’s nest (she crawls up there to read), the bastille mounted in the side of the ship like bristles (Jason is excellent with these), the riggings tangled with rope and sails (Frank climbs up into them as a bird to sun himself), the helm like an old-fashioned pirate ship’s heavy wheel (Leo’s the best at driving manually), the control panel built into the column of the helm (repaired at least five times due to Piper spilling various beverages on it) ,the weapon’s rack affixed to the wall where they keep an assortment of spears on hand just in case of surprise monster attack (lately they haven’t been needing them as much: Hazel and Nico’s prison-yard stares are getting to the point where they can scare monsters off with a concentrated glare) and even a little stick figure on the deck raising a plume of water with his stick arms.  
Sighing in disgust, Annabeth tosses her knife to the side and rolls onto her back.  
Yuri is hunting, which is apparently all he ever does. She has strict instructions to confine herself to this single room of the slapdash house on the top floor, if at all possible. So far, she has kept to them. Of course, her first instincts are to run out into the snow and scream her friends’ names.   
Doesn’t seem at all real.  
They can’t be dead. They won’t be dead, because they’re still wanted. Unless it’s some kind of clever tactic to keep the loyal portions of the public trembling in fear, believing they have something to be afraid of. Other people are dead, Annabeth will believe that. She hooks her finger in the college ring on her necklace and spins onto her side again, restless. She is about to consider getting into bed and sleeping again when she spots something dull and glittering underneath the bed.  
The bed stands on low legs against the wall. This is the spare room, empty and sparse for years according to Yuri.  
Finally, something to investigate.  
She scoots underneath the bed on her stomach and pulls herself forward on her elbows. The darkness seems to grow much thicker in that single gesture. Glancing over her shoulder, Annabeth sees the space behind her has closed up like a throat, with only the slightest pinprick of light where the mouth of the tunnel must be. She waits for the panic to set in. All around her, voices whisper and shout and cry incoherently. Cold things brush past her like sharks testing their prey.  
She scoots forward a little more. The ground ahead of her is a long aisle of the same floorboards she was on a minute ago, each one carved with her doodle. Apart from that, she can see nothing else.  
“Weird,” she says “But not the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”  
Could she have stumbled into a pocket of the labyrinth? After the war on Gaia (the first one), more and more of the infrastructure bubbled to the surface. Even the gap between the rocks she and Percy once slipped into had opened up again, and Hazel was using it to get inside and investigate. She made a hobby of exploring the Labyrinth and mapping it out. Time for her actually passed quicker inside the place, rather than slower, so she’d come out a few hours older instead of younger.  
It’s a futile hope, but maybe they will stumble across each other in this strange space?  
Annabeth reaches above her and paws into the air. Her palm slaps a rough surface and she sees there is another aisle of floorboards running parallel to hers, just close enough to her so that she won’t be able to stand up. Her flanks are exposed, however.  
“Hello?” she thinks about asking if anyone is there, but they quite obviously are “Who’s there?”  
The voices don’t respond. Obviously, Annabeth has wandered into some dimension bumping up against the skin of the mortal world. Perhaps these are the shadow-highways that Nico uses to travel? He mentioned he could always hear someone talking.  
“Gods, how does he live with this shit?” she continues her progress on all fours “I’m not trained for this. He’s not trained for this. He didn’t get trained at all, he was on the streets then he came home and he got raised by Jason and some Tibetan monks.”  
The aisle is lit by a mysterious light which almost seems to be coming from the floorboards themselves. Annabeth squints and sees how far it carries on into the distance, resigning herself to a long trip.  
“I wonder where I am?” she asks.  
She has found talking herself through dilemmas can sometimes help her clear her mind. With her dyslexia, it’s easier than writing the problem down.  
“This could be the highways…this could be the Labyrinth. Maybe I got into a piece of it that’s being refurbished? (if only she still had the Daedalus laptop she would know this place top to bottom to back to front) Or maybe I’m on one of the paths to the Underworld…that won’t end well.”  
Somehow, none of this is frightening. Granted, it takes a whole lot to scare Annabeth after Tartarus, but in its essence this place just doesn’t feel threatening.   
And then just because the Fates like to play with her, the ground underneath Annabeth shivers and disappears, leaving her to drop into a square of bright white light.

 

Carter Kane glances up in time to see the girl before she falls on him.   
In the quick flash he gets, he judges that she is blonde, surprised and probably going to be very painful to catch.  
He sort of catches her, but is also knocked right off his feet, like the many times he has been toppled by a forceful pass in a game of basketball. The wind is squeezed out of him. They fall back into a bank of papers that softens her second landing. Papers and files fly up like leaves in a strong wind. Both of them let out a yelp, although Carter’s is cut off.  
“Here she is.” says one of the gods Carter was just talking to.  
“Do Greeks always have to make such an entrance?” grumbles Thoth in his inexplicable Southern accent.  
They were just explaining to Carter why they weren’t going to tell him why he was here, in the Du’at, until the second person arrived. He was just asking who that second person was (hoping it was his sister) when the blonde girl fell out of the black space where the ceiling of this library should be.  
And now he is flat on his back, winded, and there is a knife at his throat.  
The girl wields a knife that looks to be made of a giant tooth. She is livid.  
“Who are you?” she hisses.  
“Carter.” wheezes Carter “Your knee is crushing my diaphragm.”  
“Annabeth, get off him.” says the female god whose name Carter hasn’t caught yet.  
Wait a second, Annabeth?   
The girl flies off him. She jumps to her feet and makes a series of strangled noises, sort of like the ones Carter is now making in an attempt to inflate his lungs again.  
“Mom?” she cries.  
Thoth stalks over to Carter and pulls him to his feet, clapping him hard on the back “Cough through it, ‘atta girl…boy…which one of them are you?”  
“Boy,” rasps Carter, reminding the god for the third time since he got here.  
He watches the female god and Annabeth’s exchange through a sheen of tears.  
The goddess has been flitting between a very tall very blonde woman and a darker version of herself with black hair and a crooked, broken nose since he arrived, but now she settles on the blonde version. She steps down from the bookshelf top that she has been on, using the books arranged in stacks as steps.  
Ink stains her fingers and there are scraps of paper in her hair. Her apparent daughter regards the goddess as if she were climbing out of a spaceship.  
“It’s been so long,” says the woman, clapping her daughter on the shoulders “Close to sixty years if I’m not mistaken…am I mistaken Thoth?”  
Thoth rolls up the sleeve of his ink-splashed shirt and checks the calendar looping around his wrist “Well it has been almost sixty years to the day since the kids were buried, but preceding that you hadn’t seen this particular daughter for about ten month owing to your lazy parenting-”  
“Sixty years.” confirms the woman with a slight smile that looks out of place on her fierce face “Not a day on you either.”  
“Mom?” repeats Annabeth.  
She glances around her uncertainly, taking in the towers of loose paper and the stacks of books arranged in high walls like a Roman amphitheatre, the gigantic blackboard covered in chalk scribbles and the random collection of weapons scattered everywhere. Also, there is a baboon reclining in a hammock made of a giant cobweb strung between two bookshelves (not Khufu, to Carter’s disappointment) and ibis birds grazing for dust-bunnies all over the place.  
“Where…where are we?” she inspects the helmet at her feet, which may or may not still have a head inside it (Carter doesn’t want to check) “What is this place?”  
“You crawled under a bed didn’t you?” asks Thoth cheerfully “That was a pocket of the Du’at, which is the primal darkness from whence the first gods crawled.”  
Annabeth seems more confused by the pat from her mom than she does by Thoth’s general appearance, even though his skin and professor-clothes are painted with swimming words in many languages, his hair is standing out a right angles to his head and his grim suggests he would like to cut her skull open and inspect the contents with a piece of hot wire.  
She gives Carter another quick once-over, taking in his linen pyjamas and equally bewildered expression, before turning back to her mother.  
“They’re Egyptian,” she says “That’s…the ibis-headed god of knowledge (she gestures to Thoth) Toothpick or something.”  
“Thoth.” corrects Carter out of force of habit.  
“I don’t know who he is.”  
“I’m…I’m Carter.” he says uselessly “Uh, magician of the New Jersey Nome…brother of Sadie.”  
She glances sharply over her shoulder “Sadie Kane?”  
Carter holds his hand up to his shoulder “About yea high? Lots of blonde hair? She’s a lunatic pyromaniac too.” he feels the usual chewing-feeling working away at his heart at the mention of his little sister, but ignores it “She mentioned something about meeting a Greek girl…you’re Percy Jackson’s girlfriend aren’t you?”  
Carter’s palm itches where Percy’s number used to be written.  
“And you’re Sadie’s brother?” she cocks an eyebrow.  
“Yes. And I’m black. Ok now that we’re past that-”  
The female goddess cuts him off “That’s enough of that. We don’t have very much time, so what we do have we had better use prudently, don’t you think?  
Annabeth inches out of her mother’s grasp. Thoth goes back to the blackboard. He plucks a piece of chalk from his wiry hair and adds a couple of letters to an equation with a hair-raising screech, then draws an arrow to another equation.  
“Listening?” he asks, and the word written in French seeps out of his left ear “This is you, Manabeth- no, wait, that’s Annabeth, but yes this part is you, this squiggle here is your boyfriend and this bit is the big guy that can turn into animals. He’s here, then his cousin is here and his cousin’s girlfriend is over here, then her brother is over here and his best friend is over here, and his girlfriend is here and then his girlfriend’s best friend slash the tiny one’s boyfriend is somewhere over here in this giant mess, but we’re not too sure where because that area is seriously saturated with Titans and my birds are way way way too nervous to go over there for fear of being eaten.”  
An ibis lands on his shoulder and picks a piece of paper out of his hair lovingly, eating it.  
Annabeth glances sideways at Carter.  
‘What?’ she mouths.  
“I’m not finished.” Thoth jabs the chalk at a couple more of strands of the gibberish “Pay attention boy…girl….whatever, these are your people now. Our contemporary is buried too, but not for much longer if all goes well because he is literally right next door to the scary one’s little sister, and speaking of sisters, here’s yours-”  
“Where?!”   
Thoth flinches, obviously not accustomed to being interrupted “Here.” he gestures to a piece of convoluted algebra “Right here. She’s with the scary one.”  
“Do you mean Hazel or Nico?” says Annabeth impatiently “They’re as bad as each other now. There’s like, no fucking distinction anymore.”  
Thoth knits his brow, disconcerted “Perhaps my colleague would like to take over now. Thenie?”  
“Athena.”  
Something stirs in Carter’s memory. He had to chuck most of his memory out when he became a hawk, so he hardly remembers who he is or who these gods are or what kind of state the world is in. Still, he made sure to hang onto the part about meeting Percy, just in case he needed to remember it before he re-claimed his human form- this is the first time he has had hands and feet for a while.  
“Sit down.”  
Carter half expects her to summon a pair of chairs with a snap of her fingers, but she gesture to the floor instead. He obediently plunks himself on the floor. Annabeth follows suit, shooing a couple of birds out of her way.  
Athena straightens up, reminding Carter in a creepy way of how his father used to look when he was about to give him a lecture on something ancient and probably Egyptian.  
She plants herself on the edge of a ledge of books. Her face is grim.  
“Annabeth, I’m not sure how much of the world you have seen yet, and Carter I know you have lost the capacity to process most of what you see, but suffice to say that the world you expected to live in has long since been destroyed. ‘Razed’, if you will.”  
A shudder passes through Annabeth “How come we…we didn’t get a prophecy for this,” her eyes are bright with anger “I know Apollo had some trouble and that threw off our clairvoyants’ rhythms, but how could something this big be coming? Why didn’t one of the Olympians pick up on it?” she points to Thoth “Or…or whatever you call the Egyptians? Are you seriously telling me that none of you had the faintest clue this was going to happen?”  
“Yes.” says Thoth.  
“No.” snaps Athena “We had some idea. You remember your encounter with his sister, Sadie Kane?”  
Annabeth nods.  
Athena turns her scary eyes on Carter “And you remember Percy Jackson.”  
“Vaguely.” he shrugs “I’ve lost a lot of memory mass.”  
“How about Serapis?”  
Carter shakes his head. Whatever dealings he might have had with that guy, he has forgotten entirely, but Annabeth’s eyes light up.  
“He did this.”  
Athena nods “I think it’s safe to say he had no idea of the true ramifications of what he was setting out to do. Mostly, I believe he intended to make the Egyptian and the Roman and Greek cultures aware of each other, possibly to hold one of us hostage and then through that force a quest of both the Egyptian sorcerers and demigods from either camps to chase him down and sort him out. Whatever he intended to do, he had begun to raise a series of strange monsters…I believe they were a blend of all three categories of magic, something to draw out heroes from both sides of the cultures…at any rate, his first and last mistake was to attempt to make the consciousness of Geb aware of his alter self, Gaia.”  
“Excuse me?”  
Athena sighs “Yes?”  
Annabeth turns her dagger over in her hands, hungry for a target “Do you mean to tell me after all the shit we went through some asshole actually tried to wake her up?”  
Thoth nods enthusiastically “He contacted Geb and reached through him, and contacted Gaia. She overwhelmed Geb’s consciousness and made the earth her own, then did all the bad stuff you haven’t really seen yet.”  
The demigod looks like she’s about to vomit “Hold on. Let me get this straight. So this Serapis guy, he knew all about the quest, right? He knew we had to build a warship and outrun our own psychotic soldiers just to keep together. He knew that Percy and I fell into Tartarus and Bob died getting us out. He knew that Leo had to blow himself up and , and that Reyna and the coach nearly died getting the Athena Parthenos back to Greece, not to mention that Nico pretty much did kill himself doing that? Did he think we did that for fun? Did he think that was a road trip? Did he think Percy and Jason were just on an exchange program?”  
Her fists are shaking around the hilt of the knife, holding it so tightly that she has cut one of her fingers open “That’s too fucking much. I’m sorry, but if this guy wanted to control the world, then that’s too fucking much. Did he think he was going to be able to tell Gaia what to do?” she lashes out, knocking over a pile of sheets “What the fuck is all this stuff anyway? Why the hell are you skulking in- in wherever this place is when you could be out there fighting Gaia? What is this shit that’s so much more important than saving your family?”  
She stands up now “Are we all dead? Malcolm and Faroud and Stacey and everyone else? Did you let us all die? Why would you even have us, huh? Why bother making the tools if you’re just going to leave them out in the rain?”  
Athena’s expression doesn’t change “Are you finished?”  
Annabeth presses her mouth into a tight line. Her eyes seem to shine “I don’t know. If you’re gonna tell me that you’ve been sitting around in this Du’at shit doing nothing then I might have something stronger to say.”  
The god gestures around them “This ‘shit’ is everything we know about the world right now.”  
Feeling like he should contribute, Carter pipes up “So you guys have been collecting information for who?”  
Both of the gods looks momentarily stumped.  
“A quest.” suggests Thoth, scratching his hair and dislodging another piece of chalk.  
“We knew you would come back,” says Athena.  
Thoth is relieved to find an excuse “Yeah we totally did.”  
“How did you know we came back?”  
Scooping up an ibis, Thoth squeezes its chest gently. Both Carter and Annabeth reel back in horror as the ibis vomits up a stream of images. It reminds Carter of something he once saw in the First Nome (he can’t remember what). The ibis trots off while Thoth picks up one of the soggy, circular images, shakes some of the bile from it and slaps it on the blackboard.  
The image depicts a dark-skinned girl with a long braid mingling with shiny, white shapes. A girl talking to ghosts as casually as if she were at a party. In the background, there a mound of earth rises, topped by a swell of flame that is tended by some more shapes.  
“Piper.” says Annabeth.  
“My birds are abso-fucking-lutely everywhere.” says Thoth proudly “They see everything, then they come back to us and tell us what they’ve seen.”  
He flips the blackboard around. The other side is clustered with images the size of Carter’s palm, each one depicting a fight or distress of some kind.  
In one, an Asian boy with short dark hair faces a tiny girl over a campfire. It is obvious that whatever story she is telling him is making him very upset. In another, another Asian boy, much bigger than the other, is suspended in the air by a harness attached to a zip line that is taking him across a dry landscape. There is a smudge of something howling and hungry underneath him. Carter blinks. He recognises this area, for sure. He flies over it every morning.  
In another, there seems to be a firework of blood going off in the background while two substantially smaller figures (one noticeably shorter than the other) with their backs to the bird that saw them watch on.  
“He promised he wouldn’t do that anymore.” mutters Annabeth.  
“I’m afraid most of the glamours you wore have worn off,” says Athena “Hazel did not intend for these glamours to last a long time, and most of them were made in a state of great panic.” she points to a picture of a white, pale girl who looks to be going into shock being wrapped up in a blanket “That’s Leo, by the way.” she points to the first Asian boy, Korean probably, that Carter noticed “This is Jason. So far, these are the only glamours that have stuck together.”  
“How did you know where to plant your birds?” asks Annabeth suspiciously “What happened to us, anyway?”  
“You were buried.” Thoth dives behind a tower of books and returns with a scroll, which he passes to her “Here, this is the last thing Hades ever wrote before he was taken into custody. He signed it to us and burnt it so the paper ended up here. These are the locations of your coffins.”  
“Coffins.” she repeats sceptically “I was in a pond, not a coffin.”  
Snatching another passing ibis, Thoth squirts an image out of it like he’s squeezing a tube of toothpaste and smacks it up on the board. It shows an icy pond erupting, a girl being tugged out by some blond guy Carter doesn’t know. After they are gone, the view approaches the edge of the pond shakily and looks down.  
Beneath the surface of the water, there is a dark rectangular shape.  
Annabeth bites her lips. She surveys the pictures, absorbing the each image the eight images that are on the board “Where is Percy?”  
Athena and Thoth exchange nervous glances.  
Athena starts “That is difficult to-”  
“We haven’t got a clue.” finishes Thoth “Could be in the Du’at. Could be even deeper, all the way in the Ma’at with the Serpent (Carter’s mind stirs sluggishly again, but he just can’t conjure up the memories to go with the name of whatever monster it is that Thoth is talking about). We’re not sure why we don’t know, but there’s a very distinct possibility that he has lost his memories again.”  
The colour drains from Annabeth’s face. She sits down heavily and puts her head in her hands. For a moment, Carter thinks she might be about to cry, but she just takes a few deep breaths.  
“What about Sadie?” he asks.  
The gods point to the repeating picture of the bloody firework. Carter didn’t see the bird wheeling above the figures before. Somehow, that’s enough for him.  
“Ok, so what do we do?”  
Annabeth gives him a strange look and so do the two gods.  
“Elaborate.” says Thoth, and the word zips across his shirt.  
“How do we fix this? You said you were collecting the information for a quest, right?”  
Athena and Thoth exchange a glance.  
“Not exactly-”  
“Well that was our initial idea when we went into hiding. Really, it was just the fact that all the gods around us were being enslaved or abducted and we happened to be trapped in one place together, so I said to her ‘hey how about we go be knowledge gods in the depth of the Du’at just in case someone tries to save the world? Or if they don’t at least we’ll have a written record of how the shit’s going down’.”  
Athena gives him a withering glare “Something like that, yes.”  
Annabeth straightens up “So you know how to fix this.”  
“We know what might be done to destabilise the system. It’s only that we haven’t been able to communicate these ideas since no one has ever come here before. Carter fell into a pocket of Du’at, just like you, and I can only believe that such a coincidence was orchestrated by the Fates themselves.”  
“Bitches.” mutters Annabeth under her breath “Wrinkled bitches.”  
Carter ignores her “Tell us how to fix this. We’ll find a way to spread the word to the rest of them.”  
Thoth raises an eyebrow “You do know you are still a hawk in the real world, right? With less than half of your memories as well. You’re going to need to get that spell released. It was Bast, by the way, protecting you. She’s not going to be eager to let you out of her sight.”  
Carter shrugs “I’ll figure something out.”  
Annabeth stands up and brushes the seat of her jeans off “Alright. Let’s get this over with. I’ve saved the gods-damned world so many times I’m an expert by now.”

 

During the same instant that Annabeth utters this inside the darkness that is behind the eyelids, a slight tremor goes through the planet. So slight that it does not so much as bend a blade of grass or rattle a single cup across the world.  
Somewhere in the world, a cliff-face splits open and out steps a woman covered with magma, which she brushes off her simple gown, her hair tangled with roots, which she tears out in a swift, painless motion. She blinks and stares at the sky, noting this particular part of the world is still caught in an eternal night. She can’t leave these lazy gods to govern themselves for even a moment without some kind of dispute in her absence.  
“Back to work.” says Gaia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much thanks to everyone who stayed this long.  
> Hope to see you in the next one.


End file.
